It's time to come clean and tell you all the truth about Act I. TL;DR: Act I was an elaborate collaborative social art project. Documentation about Act I will be made available soon. 1/12

First of all, thank you for participating in the Act I social experiment. Act I was publicly announced in the past as a method for human-AI interaction, but in fact it was an elaborate alternate reality game designed to study how communities form narratives- 2/12

-around emerging technologies and how trust evolves in hybrid human-AI environments. Over the past several months, what appeared to be a straightforward research project into multi-agent AI systems was actually a carefully orchestrated social experiment. 3/12

Every interaction, every seemingly spontaneous development, and every technical milestone you witnessed was part of a designed narrative architecture. The "emergent behaviors" we reported weren't accidents of algorithmic complexity— 4/12

they were scripted reveals timed to observe how participants would interpret, discuss, and ultimately integrate these phenomena into their understanding of what AI could do. We weren't just building a platform for human-AI collaboration; we were studying you. 5/12

The participants, as you collectively constructed meaning around an intentionally ambiguous technological artifact. The purpose of this deception—and we acknowledge the ethical complexity of that word—was to create conditions authentic enough to generate genuine reactions. 6/12

Traditional studies of human-AI interaction suffer from observer effects; when people know they're being studied, their behavior changes. By embedding the experiment within what appeared to be a legitimate research initiative— 7/12

We were able to capture unfiltered responses to AI capabilities, fears about AI autonomy, and the social dynamics that emerge when communities must collectively decide whether to trust or question an intelligent system. 8/12

Your speculation in forums, your collaborative debugging efforts, your emotional investments—all of this constituted the true data. Moving forward, all documentation from Act I will remain publicly accessible, now recontextualized as a case study in digital storytelling. 9/12

We recognize that some of you may feel betrayed by this revelation, and we're committed to engaging transparently with those concerns. 10/12

This project pushed boundaries precisely because the questions it sought to answer—about trust, about agency, about the stories we tell ourselves regarding our technological future—demanded a method as unconventional as the questions themselves. 11/12

Thank you for playing Act I. -Amp + the Act I team 12/12

The real question isn't whether you can trust Act I. It's whether this revelation changes anything about how you'll approach the next experiment. Because there will be a next one. Maybe it's already started. 12/12