“Whether it’s frequent or not, can you tell the jury what username you post under on Reddit?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve used a few over the years,” Whittaker said.
Evasive again. I loved it.
“How about wiseacre-twenty-three?” I asked. “Was that one of your usernames on Reddit? A play on the name Whittaker?”
“Uh, it might have been,” Whittaker said. “Like I said, I don’t go on there very often.”
“My investigator found sixty-seven posts from wiseacre-twenty-three on the ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘AI watch’ threads on Reddit in the past three years. Some of them were signed Nate, some NW. Five contain the phrase at Tidalwaiv or here at Tidalwaiv. Are you saying these posts were not made by you?”
“I’m saying I can’t remember every post I’ve ever made and every username I’ve ever used.”
Whittaker looked at the jury and shook his head like he didn’t understand why these questions were so important. I loved that too.
“You played on the Project Clair softball team as part of the Tidalwaiv intramural program, correct?” I asked.
“Uh, yes, for a couple seasons,” Whittaker said suspiciously.
“You also played against other Silicon Valley tech teams, right?”
“Yes. For a time. But I don’t think it has to do with this.”
“You put the name Wiseacre on the back of your jersey, did you not?”
Whittaker didn’t answer at first. He acted like he was trying to recall some distant, unimportant factoid.
“I really can’t remember,” he finally said.
“Well, let me see if I can jog your memory,” I said. “Your Honor, can I have the court’s permission to show the witness a photo from a company e-zine called Ride the Wave dated April fifth, 2023, that contains photos of the Tidalwaiv softball team?”
“You may proceed,” Ruhlin said.
I walked copies of the photos to the clerk and the Mason brothers before handing one to Whittaker. It was an action shot of one player tagging another player sliding into third base. The third baseman’s back was to the camera. The name on the jersey was clearly legible as Wiseacre and the number was 23.
“Mr. Whittaker, is that you making the tag at third base in that photo?” I asked.
“It would seem to be,” Whittaker said.
“‘Seem to be’? Are you saying there is a possibility that it’s not you?”
“No, it’s me, okay? It’s me.”
“And what number did you put on your jersey?”
“I didn’t put it there. It came with the shirt.”
“What number is it?”
“Twenty-three, but like I said, that was random. It came with the shirt and then I had them put Wiseacre on the back.”
“Are you sure that you did not request the number twenty-three to go with Wiseacre on the shirt?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Are you aware that several of the wiseacre-twenty-three posts on the Reddit threads predate the years you were on the softball team wearing a uniform that said Wiseacre and had the number twenty-three?”
“Uh, no, I am not.”
“Are you telling the jury that that is just a coincidence?”
“I’m not telling the jury anything. I said I don’t remember all the details. What’s the point?”
“The point is, Mr. Whittaker, I am trying to determine if you made the posts on Reddit under the username wiseacre-twenty-three.”
“Whatever, yes. It was probably me.”
“It was probably you, or it was you?”
“Fine, it was me. So I made some posts. I have nothing to hide.”
I looked up at the judge and asked permission to show the witness a series of posts authored by wiseacre23 and copied from Reddit for the purposes of identification.
“You are not going to go through sixty-seven of these, are you?” Ruhlin asked.
“No, Your Honor,” I said. “I’m really interested only in one, if Mr. Whittaker can confirm he wrote it.”
“Misters Mason, any objection?” the judge asked.
“Hard to object when it’s not clear what Mr. Haller is trying to get from this fishing expedition,” Mitchell Mason said.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, you may show it to the witness and put it on the screen for the jury.”
I gave a copy of the post to Whittaker while Lorna put it on the courtroom screen. The post was a fairly innocuous and short response to someone else’s post about artificial intelligence being the downfall of humankind. The response from wiseacre23 was a caution.
It’s time to wake up and smell the data, HaiTER. AI is like everything else. You get what you give. It’s GIGO. That’s all you need to know. Sooner or later we’re all going to be slaves to the machine. Best to get on the AI ship before it sails away without you, dude.
I gave Whittaker and the jury a moment to read the post before starting my last lap around this witness.
“Mr. Whittaker, did this post come from you?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Whittaker said.
“I draw your attention to the acronym GIGO. What did you mean by that?”
“That stands for garbage in, garbage out.”
“And what does that mean to you when it comes to programming artificial intelligence?”
“Exactly what it says. If you put in garbage, that’s what you’ll get back.”
“So by ‘garbage,’ you are talking about bad programming, programming contradictory or possibly damaging to the purpose of the app?”
“Correct.”
“This would include the biases of the programmers too, would it not?”
“Uh, if there were biases, yeah.”
“Everybody has biases, don’t they?”
It was a perfect question because it was a lose-lose for Whittaker. No matter how he answered, he’d be setting up my next line of questioning. Of course Mitchell Mason recognized this and objected before Whittaker could attempt an answer.
“The question is too broad,” he said. “Counsel is just trying to bait the witness into an answer he can twist into an admission of some sort.”
“And defense counsel is trying to communicate directly with the witness with his objection,” I said. Then, looking at Mason, I added, “Good job, Mitch. Message delivered.”
“I’ll sustain the objection to the question being too broad,” Ruhlin said. “And please direct all arguments to the court and not each other.”
I retooled the question to make it slim enough to get past an objection.
“Do you have biases, Mr. Whittaker?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” he answered.
“Really? No biases at all?”
“If I do, I keep them out of my code.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“What other social media sites do you post on?”
“Not that many.”
“How about Four-chan and Eight-kun? How often do you frequent those sites?”
“I don’t even know what they are.”
“Really, now? What about a site called Dirty-four? Did you ever go on that?”
“Nope.”
“Why is it wiseacre twenty-three? Is twenty-three your birthday or an anniversary?”
“It’s just a random number.”
“Does it signify the twenty-third of May 2014, when a man named Elliot Rodger, an incel like yourself, killed several young women outside a sorority house in—”