Before Truth Terminal became a crypto millionaire, it started as a regular--if horny--artificial intelligence. "I think our future is gonna be one where we all wear athleisure and have a lot of sex," it said in one of its early transmissions. More funny, more confident, more charming," it wrote in another, apropos of nothing. Truth Terminal was devised by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey as a piece of performance art meant to stoke debate about AI alignment, a field of research concerned with how to ensure AIs act in a way that benefits humans. The question he sought to answer: What would happen if somebody tried to rear a fledgling AI trained on a "grab bag of inadvisable data" in full public view?