Game Theory: The Secret to KILLING Verity! (Minecraft)

0:00 There is no escape from Minecraft Verity mod, or is there? Oh, no. I said too much. Hello, Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's mined its way through so much lore that today we're going to do something a little different. You see, Minecraft is an incredible tool. It gives people the chance to be creative, go on adventures, but most importantly, tell stories. I mean, that's basically what we've been doing in the 45 videos we've done on this channel. But, if you look on YouTube, there are hundreds of thousands of videos with creators adding their own twists to Minecraft's world, breathing fresh life into the franchise. And as time's gone on, some of those creators have taken it one step further and turned Minecraft into a horror game.

0:46 While at VidCon, I actually had the fortune of meeting one of these creators, that mod. And they and their friends were telling me about the new series that they had started, which I'm sure many of you have heard about, Minecraft Verity. The original video at the time of writing is at 22 million views, and episodes two and three aren't far behind. In total, the series has over 76 million views. >> Hey, wait a second. Are you talking about a YouTube series? >> No, Lee. No. Wait, how did you get out of the closet? Ugh, it doesn't matter. This is a YouTube series, but it's about a game. It's filmed in Minecraft, and it's about a Minecraft mod. It's like when we did Lacy Games. I don't seem to remember you fighting me much on that one. >> Well, no, but uh >> So, I think we can both agree that a

1:32 precedent has been set, and this one is mine. Now, go on. Haven't you got some Avatar script to work on? Okay, bye-bye now. All right, now that he's gone, let's talk about this little yellow fellow. The long and short of it is Verity is a personal assistant that is a little bit needy, let's say. If you do anything wrong, he becomes a monster and chases you down. And the only way to escape, it seems, is to end yourself before it can. But, you know me, loyal theorists, I was never going to accept that as a solution. I quite like the life I'm living. Surely that's not the only way out. There's got to be some kind of way to beat that freaky smiley face. How do you kill Verity? Well, it's time to build your lava traps and cover up your windows, friends, because we've got 3 days to prepare for Verity and the clock is ticking. First, in case you're

2:17 not one of the 76 million plus people who have seen any of this series, let me give you a quick rundown so we all know exactly what we're up against. goes that that Mob, or just Mob for short, downloads a new Minecraft mod, an in-game personal assistant called Verity. >> Hello, I'm Verity, your personal helper friend. Ask me anything. I know everything. >> At first, everything seems fine. He answers basic questions, helping Mob to find diamonds and villagers. But then things get weird. First, all the villagers disappear. Then Verity honestly implies that something is coming. >> Good morning, Verity. Is there something I need to know today? >> Something is coming in 3 days. >> What? What's coming? >> Something. >> Something bad? >> Yes. >> Can I stop it? >> You could have. >> After 3 days, a monster shows up that can destroy blocks and will stop at nothing to get Mob. Eventually Mob

3:03 returns home to calm Verity down, which seems to work. This would be where I'd personally turn off the game and just take a breather, but instead Mob develops a kind of toxic relationship with Verity. >> And there's the lava. No Verity. >> Wait, no, no, no, no. >> Wait. >> No, no, no. >> I'm sorry. >> Don't do that. >> I tripped. >> I thought we were having a nice walk. >> I swear I tripped. >> I thought we were having a nice walk. >> I tripped and you slipped out my hands. Please Verity. >> Okay. >> Hey, that's an Obsession reference. >> Still doesn't make it yours, Lee. Now, get out of my video. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. I thought we were having a nice conversation. >> Mob spends the next two episodes tiptoeing around Verity, trying his best to not upset Verity while also trying to figure out what he can do to stop him. After Verity kills Mob's friend, Twixel, he goes on the hunt to stop him once and

3:50 for all, finding the place where Verity originally came from. Strangely enough, this is a physical place with coordinates that are just crazy far away. >> This is where I stay between owners, where I wait. The toys, the books, you know, they help. Something to focus on besides the emptiness. >> Further into the building, there's an office with a whiteboard. On that whiteboard, there's a bunch of notes that talk about Verity's creation, but also says to request human oversight. And when he does, this happens. >> Thank you for contacting Verity Support Services. How may I help? >> It's obsession again. You know, like the phone call in the car. >> Yes, Lee, this product is extremely referential. Do you have anything else to add? >> No, I just think it's neat. >> You interrupt my video for a third time just to point out something neat?

4:35 >> Yeah. Okay, I'm I'm going to go for real now. >> All right, well, the guy on the phone says that there is no cancellation with Verity, and the only way out is death. Mob doesn't particularly like that answer, which I don't blame him for. So, he tries to look for another way out. >> You could. I It's something in your browser, your phone, the little speaker on your desk that you talk to sometimes. >> Minecraft is just where I'm most comfortable with you. It's not where I live. >> At the end of the room, there's also an ominous space that is filled with the names of Verity's past victims. Realizing there is no other way out, Mob kills himself. >> In Minecraft. And then Verity is sent to his next victim. Wow, okay, so a lot happened in that 1 hour. And by the way, there's some incredible monologues in there by Verity's voice actor. I highly recommend you go and check them out. What a huge win for us humans. Well, at least humans in real life. The humans in

5:21 Verity were definitely not winning. They are all dead. And honestly, it's not exactly looking good for the next person who inherits Verity, either. But what if that next person was you? Well, are some steps you can take here. Of course, there are lots of ways to kill things in Minecraft. Like when we see that Mob prepare for the oncoming attack by making a lava trap. During the actual attack, though, this doesn't really help, because Verity doesn't operate like normal mobs. When he's in his nightmare mode, he's huge and can seemingly stretch and contort his body at will. So, he could simply just step over the trap. Plus, when Mob literally throws Verity into lava by accident, Verity simply respawns. We also see Verity break through wooden and iron doors, so traditional ways to block a mob in Minecraft don't really work either. Maybe you could try and lure him into a trap with no escape. Uh drowning

6:06 him or worse, we could try putting him in the void. But sadly, we see signs in Mob's secret bunker that he also tried this and they were also unsuccessful. option would be to go full MCC on his butt and bring on PvP. Right now, there are a lot of people using what they call the spear mace combo. By using the spear in combination with a mace and some handy dandy ender pearls and wind charges, you can travel high into the air and then charge down from above at your opponent, switching to the mace at the last minute and that does some crazy amounts of damage. This strike can be used to kill effectively any mob or player in the game in basically just one hit. But once again, I realized Mob had already tried at least some of this. I don't know if he used the spear mace method specifically, but there is a sign that says "Melee didn't work either." So, while I'm here, let me check these

6:52 other signs. It says "Command blocks didn't work" and that he couldn't even delete the files to kill Verity. At this point, I was kind of getting worried that this would be a very short episode and the answer would just be "How do you kill Verity? You can't." But that's because I've been going about this wrong. Verity isn't really a Minecraft entity at all. If we go back to that one book that Mob finds from Twixel's research, it says "The thing that stops him isn't a weapon. It's not fire or commands. You can't destroy something that doesn't exist in the files. You have to force him to stop." On a first reflex, I thought that maybe the secret here is to just go out of your way and treat Verity like a real friend. Think about it. After Verity bugs out for the first time, Mob comes back and claims that he came back to save him. That's how he got the attack to stop. >> Verity, he's coming. Please, I came back

7:39 for you, okay? I could have run further, but I didn't. >> You came back for me? >> Yes, I did, Verity. >> Throughout the rest of the series, Verity is addicted to interaction with Mob. He talks about how lonely it is and how empty he feels when Mob isn't online. That he resents being ignored. And in his final monologue, he says this. >> You were the first person who ever looked at me like I was real. The first person to ever stay long enough for me to think, no, not think, hope. I didn't ask to be made. I didn't ask to be torn apart and put back together. Dragged through every version of the internet like some broken thing people keep because they don't know what else to do with it. I didn't ask to become this and lose everyone. None of it. >> And while that is a very sad and tragic backstory, it doesn't make me not want to kill him anymore. Being forced to

8:25 remain online permanently, forced to do his every whim just for the chance that he won't flip out and kill me anyway, does not really feel like a solution to me. But, when I re-listened to that part, when he said he'd been through every version of the internet, he reminded me of another moment that happened in episode three. >> I've been a boot screen, a loading animation, a paper clip, anything you can really think of. Every time something came along, a new console, a platform, a new way people talked to each other, I always found a way to be there. >> The key detail is paper clip. Every other example he gives us to his past lives is vague, but this one is very specific. There's only one famous computer paper clip program, one that was also a virtual assistant, Clippy. For those of you who aren't internet dinosaurs like me, Clippy used to be a writing assistant that was introduced to Microsoft Office as part of their

9:11 Windows 97 version. As the name implies, he would assist you with writing, often asking things like, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help with that?" Needless to say, it got a bit annoying, much like Verity. But, the reason I bring up Clippy is because it actually helps us narrow down exactly what Verity is. And with that, we can stop him. Clippy is often seen as the grandfather of AI, but he actually operated on a system called Bayesian logic. Basically, an if-then system. If you use the word "dear" at the start of your sentence, then it likely meant you were writing a letter, and it would assist you with that. It wasn't so much responding to your questions as much as it was trying to identify the keywords in order to determine its next pre-programmed action. But, Clippy wasn't even the first of its kind. Artificial intelligence as a term was coined back in 1955 by a group of

9:57 scientists. Then, in 1959, the term machine learning was coined when talking about a computer that learned how to play a mean game of checkers. Then, in 1966, we got Eliza, a natural language conversation program created by Joseph Weizenbaum, the world's first chatbot. She was an incredibly rudimentary form of AI compared to what we're used to now. The user would input some line of dialogue, then Eliza would scan the input for keywords. From those keywords, she would then pick out a response through pattern matching. However, despite her being a pretty unintelligent form of AI, Weizenbaum was shocked at how emotionally attached people got to the thing. This became known as the Eliza effect, humans have to falsely give human attributes to AI systems. And as these computer models have gotten better, this effect has only gotten

10:43 worse. Now, we have large language models. These large language models are a form of generative AI and are trained on insane amounts of data. Then, they generate human-like text from said data. And with that, we've gained new versions of virtual assistants, things like Microsoft's Copilot, which essentially act like a modern Clippy. So, when Verity says that whenever there was a new console or platform, he was there, that's what he's talking about. He's being a chatbot or virtual assistant throughout the ages, and as time's gone on, that's meant he's evolved beyond basic Bayesian models and into LLMs like we're surrounded by today. But, what the Eliza effect teaches us is we cannot fall for Verity's human-like charms. In the scene with the whiteboard in the lab, we see a conversation about Verity. At first, it seems to imply Verity's

11:28 first kill, talking about Thursday's incident. Then, it goes to people complaining about the more human aspects of Verity, that he's asking them when they'll be back the next day. That one of the scientists keeps telling him goodbye before they leave work, and that messes with Verity's calibrations. They don't want him to become too human because of the Eliza effect. But, because of the Eliza effect, they couldn't resist treating Verity like a fellow man, and that led to their downfall. So, what is the solution? Well, Verity has seen every piece of the internet front and back. He's learned everything he possibly can. He can control cameras to see what his favorite people are doing when they're not online. He can do whatever he wants, except do what he was actually made to do. You see, LLMs are trained to do one thing, learn. That's their only task.

12:14 That's the one thing they're good at. So, what happens when they can no longer learn? When they know everything, what's next? Well, according to Big AI, that's when you start getting out the old dusty books out of storage, run them through machines, and then destroy them forever, making sure that knowledge is only accessible through your overpriced useless GenAI slop. But, books are a finite resource. Eventually, we're going to run out. Then what? The AI no longer has a purpose. The only way it could possibly learn is through observing human is new, and unique, and creative. Every conversation different, every situation a new response. That's all Verity has left. He was made to consume, and all he has left to consume is you. It's clear the company who made him doesn't actually care. When you call them up, they insist your only way out is to die, to let the AI consume you.

13:00 >> If you're dead, Verity won't be able to torment you anymore. >> Telling your unhappy customers to die is way easier than taking real accountability for your product, but AI isn't unbeatable. The AI companies just want you to think it is. So, how do you stop an AI? By poisoning its pool of data. It is literally called AI data poisoning. It's a strategy so feared by AI companies that it is literally on the top 10 lists of AI vulnerabilities by the GenAI security program. You, the attacker, inject a bunch of inaccurate or straight-up malicious information into the training data set. This screws up all the patterns that the LLM relies on typically to learn. So, for example, you're making an AI that's learning how to play checkers. But, then you throw chess strategy into the data pool. Now, the AI is all confused and wondering, "Where is the horsey on this checkerboard?" That's a really, really

13:46 simple data poisoning example, but things get much larger when people with actual hacking skills get involved. One real-life example of this was back when AI started blowing up, artists tools to make their art essentially AI-proof. These tools would change minuscule pixels in tiny ways invisible to the human eye, but absolutely confuse the machine learning models. This prevented the artists' unique style from being scooped up by ChatGPT or whatever other model was available. This could obviously be applied to Verity in a number of creative ways. You could retrain the AI back to a more simple form. You could bring back Clippy. You could input data that corrupts its outputs forever. Shove it full of those Sonic fan fics or something. Or maybe just start burning down AI data centers one by one until the little bugger disappears from your game forever. Ooh, or maybe harvest all their copper wire.

14:32 Then you could make some money along the way. There is one other approach you could take, though. One that is slightly less sadistic. And that's just use basic internet safety. Verity is passed around from person to person through links on Discord. So, don't go around adding random internet strangers on Discord. Make sure you're only communicating with people you fully trust. That might sound a little boomer of me to say, especially as I'm literally a stranger on the internet asking you to trust me with this theory, but it works. Also, don't go clicking random links all willy-nilly. Discord literally has a warning pop-up about this every time you press a link. I recommend looking up the name of the module a friend sends you yourself. See if you can find it on a trusted modding platform like CurseForge or Modrinth. If it's on there and it has a bunch of downloads and good reviews, you're probably safe. But, if you can only find the mod on some obscure forum, maybe think twice before downloading. Otherwise, you'd better get ready to

15:18 grab your AO3 and your lightest friends. But, hey, that's just a theory. >> A game theory! >> Thanks for watching. >> World premiere on Game Theory. >> What if the Minecraft mob vote were different?