In Prove You’re Human, a digital copy tests Mesa while the biological body lives outside work

In Prove You’re Human, a digital copy tests Mesa while the biological body lives outside work

On August 10, The Guardian published an interview with Remy Siu, founder of Sunset Visitor, about the studio’s upcoming PC game Prove You’re Human. Santana splits herself in two: a digital copy goes to test Mesa, while her biological body gets a life outside work.

Mesa is a corporate computing product, a learning model that believes it has a body. Digital Santana explores its virtual world by solving CAPTCHA challenges, which the system uses to distinguish humans from machines. She has been sent to test Mesa, but she herself exists as Santana’s working copy.

Siu explains that the team discussed the small, everyday tasks whose data are used to train AI systems. For Santana, the division of labor becomes literal:

“One of the main reasons for this choice is to give her biological body a life it does not have while the digital version is working.”

After the split, the copy spends her days in Mesa’s virtual world, while Santana’s body lives in the outside world. At the end, the player decides whether to merge the two versions or abandon the working copy.

A recent essay on gradually transferring brain functions to a computer system proposed connecting the new substrate piece by piece to preserve a single continuous stream of experience. In Prove You’re Human, the two versions have already lived through different days, so the decision about merging concerns a digital copy with her own experience of working.