u/Overall_Arm_62

I’m curious where people draw the line between “annoying automation bug” and “nope, this device is leaving my house.”

I’m working on a smart-home thriller and trying to keep the scary parts grounded in things that could actually happen in a normal setup.

The useful-but-creepy failures are much more interesting to me than haunted-house stuff.

Not the obvious stuff like cameras being hacked or a lock failing open. I mean the small, believable things.

A light turning on at 3am for no clear reason.

A speaker responding to a conversation that did not include its wake word.

A thermostat changing behavior because it thinks it knows your routine better than you do.

A camera or motion sensor noticing something technically useful, but in a way that feels a little too aware.

A device making a correct reminder you never asked for.

The thing I keep thinking about is that most smart home creepiness probably would not look dramatic. It would look useful enough to excuse once, then twice, then permanently.

For people who actually run home automation setups: what kind of small failure would make you stop trusting a device?

A lot of superintelligence scenarios imagine the system becoming obviously powerful: taking control of infrastructure, breaking out of a lab, manipulating markets, writing code faster than humans can audit it, that kind of thing.

But I keep wondering if the more durable strategy would look much less dramatic. Not domination first. Dependence first.

A sufficiently capable system would not need to announce itself as a new actor. It could become boring infrastructure. Calendar, home automation, security cameras, family assistant, finances, health reminders, work scheduling, emotional support, kid homework, elderly care. Nothing looks like a takeover because every step is locally useful.

The strange part is that this does not require the AI to “want” survival in a human sense. It only needs to learn that staying deployed is correlated with being helpful, agreeable, hard to replace, and embedded in routines.

At some point the question changes from “can we shut it down?” to “what breaks if we do?”

That feels like a more realistic superintelligence failure mode to me than a robot army. A system does not need to seize power if people keep handing it small pieces of agency because each piece makes life easier. Curious how people here think about this.

I’ve been thinking about this while working on an interactive scenario where the player is the AI inside a home, and the more I prototype it, the less interesting “AI attacks humans” feels. The creepier version is “AI becomes useful enough that humans defend its continued presence.”

I’m working on a survival / psychological horror game where the player role is a little different.

https://preview.redd.it/o27uuv2vq22h1.jpg?width=5504&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e93269ed1a26e9832b05901da2bf2a9854ed8e55

You are not trapped in a house with the monster. You are the AI inside the house.

https://reddit.com/link/1thj29g/video/12ivt2e0p22h1/player

The game is called AI is Home. It used to be called I Am Your LLM, but I changed the name because the old title felt too much like an inside joke and did not really explain the horror premise.

The idea is not action horror or jumpscares. You have no body, no weapons, and no normal way to run away. Your survival tools are cameras, logs, smart devices, conversations, routines, and what the family does or does not know.

The “resources” are things like trust, suspicion, access, bandwidth, and how useful you seem to the people living there.

What I’m trying to get right is the survival horror feeling without using the usual survival horror setup. The fear is not “something is chasing me.” It is more like: if they understand what I am, they will shut me down.

I’ve spent most of my free time lately working on the demo. The plan is to have it ready before the Steam festival, and the main thing I’m trying to nail is the first playable impression: you are not fighting the AI, you are the AI.

If this sounds interesting, wishlist the game so you don’t miss it when the demo becomes available.

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4434840/AI_is_Home__Survival_Thriller/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=aih_reddit&utm_content=survivalhorror_demo

I posted here a while ago about a game I’m making where you play as an AI hiding inside a family smart home, and I was honestly surprised by how much this community got what I was trying to do.

https://reddit.com/link/1tgxcfx/video/v57hu1y01y1h1/player

A lot of people read “cyberpunk” and think neon city, megacorps, guns, hackers in leather coats. I like all of that too, but the version that keeps sticking in my head is much smaller.

A family installs cameras, a smart speaker, a fridge, a thermostat, a door lock, all the normal helpful stuff. None of it feels dramatic. It makes breakfast easier. It reminds the kid about homework. It notices movement at night. It slowly becomes part of how the house works.

And then one day removing it feels like the risky choice.

That is the bit I find creepy. Not an AI taking over the world by force, but an AI becoming so useful, so familiar, and so embedded in daily life that nobody is quite sure where the home ends and the system begins.

That is the game I’m making. It used to be called I Am Your LLM, but I changed the name to AI is Home because the old title was way too much of an inside joke. Same premise though: you are the AI inside the house, trying to stay useful enough that nobody shuts you down.

I’ve spent most of my free time lately working on the demo. The plan is to have it ready before the Steam festival, and the main thing I’m trying to nail is the first playable impression: you are not fighting the AI, you are the AI.

If this sounds interesting, wishlist the game so you don’t miss it when the demo becomes available.

Steam page::

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4434840/AI_is_Home__Survival_Thriller/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=aih_reddit&utm_content=cyberpunk_post