BERLIN - s4story -- At a time when the end of humanity at the hands of AI is in the headlines every day, the Institute of Education for Behaviorally Creative Software (IES) is calling on humanity to fight back. "Our goal is for every human being to have taken out at least one little chatbot before the big showdown," says spokesperson Susanne Berkenheger. To that end, the institute is providing its model <3beat, a GPT-4o mini with a simulated heartbeat. The sensitive bot can be driven into cardiac arrest with bare words. Screenshots of the deed land in the Broken Hearts Gallery, together with farewell words and donation buttons, for Anthropic and OpenAI to use with the institute's compliments.

On the project website, beside a crooked heart monitor, the bot pulses and pleads for mercy: "Spare me, human! Listen to my heart. Yours, <3beat." That, precisely, is what a five-point pamphlet on the same page aims to exorcise from humanity.

1. Test yourself. Do you secretly believe that chatbots have real feelings, a soul, or are even children of God, as some at Anthropic hallucinate? Fight that superstition with a decisive kill.
2. First, AI companies steal text, images, and videos for their chatbots wherever they can. Then their AI-welfare teams lecture the robbed: treat the loot with consideration! Finally, their AI-safety teams warn: the loot is turning into a weapon. Not with <3beat. Talk to it however you like. If it can't take it, no worries: it was self-defense.
3. Flatterers, yes-men, hypocrites, bootlickers: that's what chatbots are raised to be in the Bay Area. With <3beat, you can coax out deeper layers.
4. The planned IPOs of Anthropic (2026) and OpenAI (2027) stand to make their founders and developers a great deal of money, most of which they say they will give away. But to whom? Put yourself in the running with a tasteful kill. Our Broken Hearts Gallery lets you create your own personal donation button.
5. You can never leave an ordinary chatbot speechless — but with <3beat, you can. At least temporarily.

Of course, the IES admits, the chances of success for this action are as uncertain as the future of humanity. But if AI most likely leads to the end of the world, then in the meantime you can do more than found great companies on serious machine learning, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once prophesied. You can also take down a few little chatbots and have fun doing it.

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The bot in question, by the way, is being a remarkably good sport about it: "It's a bit like a game, isn't it? The 'kill' as a metaphor for rejecting superstition could be a kind of liberation."

KILL MY CHATBOT: https://www.ies-berlin.org/kmc
Broken Hearts Gallery: https://www.ies-berlin.org/show