It's Time to Come Clean (2001)

I know nothing about this but I'm hoping that I pieced the story together correctly: From 1999-2001 there was a hoax on the internet - a person named Kaycee - who supposedly had lukemia and died. [1] She was primarily run by a 40 year wold mom in Kansas. The puppeteers gave Kaycee such an elaborate persona that many people truly believed she was real. It's heartbreaking seeing some of the things people wrote.

> I am one of those folks who was emotionally involved in Kaycee's life. I believe ... that she was a real person. ... Kaycee was here. Now she is not. And I miss her very much. [2]

This post is supposed to be a joke. This is someone playing along with the story, saying that Kaycee actually wasn't real... but because she was actually an AI developed in an MIT lab that was so dangerous that the researchers shut it down...[3]

The funny thing is this is actually plausible now. Earlier today I found an entire gang of youtube channels that try to act like they're actually being run by real-life attractive women. The youtube channel has links to instagram pages that try to look convincing real and authentic. They comment on each other's videos in order to try to convince viewers that they're real. People aren't making fake AI people because it's funny, they're bored, or because someone wants to destroy the world. They're here now to make easy ad revenue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaycee_Nicole [2] https://www.metafilter.com/7819/Is-it-possible-that-Kaycee-d... [3] https://metatalk.metafilter.com/608/Plastic-gets-the-story-a...