Len’s eyebrows rose, and for the first time, he held Tank’s gaze. “What do you have beyond the starter package?”
Tank leaned back on his barstool and looked at Len as if assessing his credit-worthiness.
“Beyond that is a package I pitch at people who are looking to create a business-oriented presence. Influencers and the like. It’s a bit pricier, but it includes original tweets instead of only retweets, and the algorithm is more configurable, allowing you to fine-tune your online personality with scant five more minutes of time invested.”
Len’s jaw dropped. “Original tweets? Do you have people writing them in a sweatshop in Nigeria?”
Tank’s laughter boomed through the tiny shop again. Len winced and searched for a volume slider below Tank’s face. “It’s all generated by the AI algorithm, my man. No one writes it.”
Scripts, greeting cards, even books written by an AI existed, but that dampened Len’s interest. The quality was notorious. When his expression went sour, Tank pulled up another profile and let Len read.
“These are … good,” Len said. “Really good. And they’re not just copied from somewhere?”
Tank shook his head.
Len read a few more posts. “But they all seem a little familiar. Haven’t I read them somewhere before?”
All Tank subjected him to this time was a chuckle. “I said original tweets, not original ideas.”
Len’s face fell.
“Take heart, my man! When was the last time you saw an original idea or opinion on the Internet?”
Although he was sure he couldn’t afford it, Len had to know. “Is that all you offer?”
There was something nourishing about the way Tank beamed, as if his smile reached all the way back to a childhood spent playing with ladybugs and fireflies on a back lawn. “I have one more package, but that’s for the movers and shakers. It sports the highest configurability. It scours other profiles for people with similar interests and likes their posts or tries to befriend them. It selects a new profile picture for you every week based on pictures you’ve taken and viewed. Best of all, it comes equipped with a personalized obscure, new, or controversial social cause to create the illusion of original thought and carve out an uninhabited opinion space on the Internet.”
Len couldn’t look away. “Like what?”