The Steam Next Fest demo for interactive fiction game Qualia is over after only a few, uneasy minutes, but it's haunting me more than some full-sized horror games.
Created by solo dev Sydney Brafman, Qualia is a philosophical point-and-click quiz that asks you to evaluate whether two anonymous participants are human by simply rating their answers to questions as "human" or "artificial." Quickly, the demo makes it clear that the human mind isn't so exceptional; it's sometimes unnervingly impossible to distinguish a woman from a robot. "We recommend judging the answers to each question based on: creativity, empathy, natural language use, ethical considerations, relevance," the test – issued by the fictional company intellica, which encourages me to "think happy" in a tagline – announces from inside a humming CRT monitor.
OK, sounds easy enough. Search engine results, art, and romance – by way of submissive, chatbot boyfriends – have all been getting overwhelmed by AI, so I think I've gotten good at determining what feels like it has a pulse and what comes from Midjourney's spit.
But the Qualia demo makes me question my instincts. Its CRT glows greenish and asks me the first misleading question: Is this a picture of a bicycle?
Underneath, there's a utilitarian painting of a bike splattered on black asphalt, so, yes, it is a picture representation of a bicycle.