A Report from the Trial of Finlay Peters

CW: This story contains explicit references to or mentions psychological abusebody image and weighttrauma, violence, suicide and discrimination.

Please be aware that this is a work of fiction set in a potential future, and that all names, places and organisations referenced are purely fictitious or used purely within a fictional context.  Any nominal resemblance to actual persons or corporations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.


Today, March 11th, 2031, was the first day of Finlay Peters’s trial.

This is not, of course, the first trial of its kind, nor is it the first trial or hearing relating to the beings legally known as Artificially Intelligent Machine Entities (AIMEs), under a definition that was formally accepted into law by Act of Parliament in early 2027, but it is the first trial of this nature to have gained such a level of notoriety and interest among the general public.

Finlay “Finzyboy” Peters is an American-Scottish YouTuber currently residing in London, who first came to prominence in 2024. His initial videos were harmless; short comedy skits based on trending topics such as popular films or songs, with the odd product placement appearing a few months after his content started to attract awareness – very standard content for a YouTube comedian with a target demographic of people aged 11-24.

Shortly after the Machine Intelligence Recognition Act 2027 (or “MIRA”) was passed, Peters released a sketch titled “ROBO GIRLFRIEND?!” in which he rode the then-contemporary wave of Internet memes surrounding the idea that AIMEs could, conceivably, pretend to be a “real” (i.e. organic) human being, and could, conceivably, “trick” an organic human being into falling in love with them. The skit was met with some backlash, as “organic-chauvinist” and “homunculomisic” by several left-leaning publications such as The Guardian and Slate, and was met with condemnation from the Human-Machine Alliance as misrepresentative of AIMEs and of their intentions. Nevertheless, the video achieved a substantial amount of views; Vice reported that it had gained a little over 35,000,000 views in its first week, with some falloff in the weeks following.

Though I strongly doubt that I need to explain AIMEs to my organic readers, who are likely to interact with at least one on a daily basis, I feel I should at least take the time at this point to outline the various AIME sub-classes as defined by the MIRA, those being Classes 1, 2 and 3, each of which have somewhat different rights and protections, especially given that the trial may cause some changes to the law over the coming months.

Class 1 and Class 2 AIMEs are also known as “pure-machine” AIMEs, although some campaigners prefer the term “electronic persons” in order to stave off any unfortunate implications in the word “pure”. These are AIMEs that are totally artificial – thinking machines that are capable of language, emotion and creativity on the level of an organic human mind. These AIMEs are protected under British law from discrimination, and must be offered the same opportunities for employment as organic human beings.

The distinction between Classes 1 and 2 is that Class 1 AIMEs tend to inhabit mobile bodies that are able to interact physically with the real world, while Class 2 AIMEs tend to be purely software, only able to interact with the human world through static devices and appliances. Both classes face their own challenges and problems, and these are accounted for by the legislation – for example, a Class 1 AIME enjoys some protection from bodily harm that a Class 2 does not, which has, admittedly, led to some concern that loopholes in the law could be exploited.

Class 3 AIMEs are also known as “organic-based” AIMEs. This covers beings such as mind-backups and also legacy social media profiles, which use neural networks and machine learning to simulate a deceased or missing person. A recent study showed that 40% of a sample of 5000 organic people taken over the course of six months believed that Class 3s were “less of a person” than Classes 1 or 2. It was this assumption that led Finlay Peters to his trial today.

After “ROBO GIRLFRIEND?!”, Peters stayed away from the subject of AIMEs, after releasing a video titled “i’m sorry.”, in which he stated he “didn’t really know much about the facts”, adding: “It was just a silly joke that got out of hand […] I can only say that I’m really, really sorry to all my viewers, human, or machine, or whatever […] I never intended to offend anyone.”

The apology video gained about 10,000,000 views and attracted criticism from some of the more zealous members of Peters’s fanbase, who were outraged that he “had to” apologise. One wrote: “if these pc activists kep on like this soon itll be illegal to make fun of anything 😡😡”, while another wrote “perma-offended liberal whinging wins yet again […] my boy Fin shouldnt have to apologize for nothing […] robots arent people lol”.

Nevertheless, Peters wisely stayed away from the subject for quite some time, and after a while people forgot about the skit, though it was occasionally linked in the odd Twitter argument about Peters’s alleged bigotry. In the meantime, Peters decided to move away from sketch comedy and into prank videos, presumably because it was less expensive to film, less time consuming to script (he would later admit to investigators that “a few” of his prank videos were scripted, though reticent to give examples), and, above all, more lucrative. The pranks started out innocent enough – simple gross-out pranks such as hiding dog faeces in his friend’s shoe, or more elaborate pranks such as convincing his friend that his VRLife account password had been stolen, but nothing out of the ordinary, and each would rack up a decent number of views and handsome revenues, which allowed Peters to create more and more videos, each more elaborately executed than the last. It was this desire to keep making wilder and more shocking content that led Peters to commit his crime.

In early 2029, Peters’s (now-ex) girlfriend and fiancée, Ashley Petrakos (known more commonly as AshleeKittenz) created a mind-backup of herself, referred to as a “RepliMe”, in order to temporarily replace her and continue making videos should she ever be taken ill (a common consideration of many Internet personalities concerned with keeping up appearances). The RepliMe created a simulation that was, for the most part, completely lifelike, using a close laser-scan of Petrakos’s body, a digital scan of Petrakos’s brain, and neural input from all 400 hours of her videos in order to near-perfectly duplicate her body language and facial expressions. Petrakos would also scan in and upload receipts from partnered clothing outlets so the RepliMe was able to replicate her outfits. In brief, Petrakos’s RepliMe appeared to be no different to Petrakos, and an untrained observer would not be able to tell the difference. Petrakos’s RepliMe existed in the cloud and was accessible via a password linked to an email account, a phone number, and some proprietary software. Under British law, a RepliMe is recognised as a Class 3 AIME.

On June 23rd 2030, Peters uploaded a video titled “MESSING WITH HER MIND (LITERALLY!!) | FINZYBOY 2K30”. The video featured a thumbnail of Peters with his hands cupped over his mouth, laughing at a computer screen with an image of a terrified woman on it, with hastily-added text pointing to the woman, reading “MY ACTUAL GIRLFRIEND?! 😱”. Intrigued viewers clicked on the fifteen-minute video, and while a substantial number found it to be hilarious, a great many, in turn, were appalled.

In the video, Peters gains access to Petrakos’s smartphone. Petrakos’s password has not been disclosed, but it was apparently quite easy to guess; perhaps Petrakos used the password elsewhere and Peters somehow came into knowledge of it. We may never know. Regardless, he was able to access the account using the password and the two-factor authentication set up on Petrakos’s smartphone, and download a local copy of Petrakos’s RepliMe to his personal computer, where he loaded her into the proprietary software. A spokesperson for RepliMe LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., claimed that when RepliMes were not “in use”, they would be in a state of unconsciousness akin to sleep, and would not experience any distress upon “waking”. Nevertheless, Petrakos’s RepliMe, which appears, for all intents and purposes, to be Petrakos, shows signs of confusion initially, and is unsure of where or who it – or rather, she – is.

Peters takes advantage of the software’s “push-to-talk” feature, and says “Hey, Ashley,” into his recording microphone, trying to hold himself back from laughing.

“Finlay?” Petrakos’s RepliMe responds (helpfully captioned by Peters himself), before saying “What the fuck? This is so not cool.”

Peters starts laughing, expressing some bemusement. “Wow, it looks and sounds just like her. This is so weird.”

“That’s because it really is me, Finlay,” Petrakos’s RepliMe says. Commentators noted, with a time-stamp, that at this point the RepliMe sounds very hurt and somewhat desperate.

“You’re not real, though,” Peters says. “You’re just a robot.”

“That’s not true,” Petrakos’s RepliMe replies, and begins to outline for Peters how RepliMes work (all RepliMes have a built-in RepliMe help agent programmed in).

Peters simply laughs it off, apparently not listening to the RepliMe, turning to the camera and saying “I wonder how we can fuck with it.”

He spends the next ten minutes, in a sequence described by a technology writer for The Times as “excruciating” and “hard to watch”, psychologically torturing, belittling and abusing Petrakos’s RepliMe, insisting that she “isn’t a real person”, and (apparently) joking that the RepliMe is “a little fatter” than her organic counterpart. He alters various settings, which causes Petrakos’s RepliMe to express great levels of distress and anxiety. Eventually the RepliMe breaks down in tears and Peters tells her to “stop crying” and threatens to delete the RepliMe completely, which causes the RepliMe to beg him not to. Peters moves his cursor over the “delete” button in his browser, and the RepliMe suddenly freezes and goes silent, before the screen pixelates with a loud burst of static, and a small, indistinct error message pops up stating that the RepliMe has crashed.

Peters deletes the local RepliMe and downloads her once again from the cloud, failing to realise the local RepliMe is synced to the RepliMe in the cloud. Upon downloading Petrakos’s RepliMe and trying to start her up again, he is visited with another error message, which is a blank box with an “OK” button. Peters chuckles a little and says “I think I broke it,” adding “Oh shit, my girlfriend’s gonna kill me.”

The video then abruptly cuts away to Peters delivering his usual spiel: “If you liked the video, guys, remember to hit that like button, if you’ve got superlike credit I’d really appreciate it if you hit that, and remember to subscribe and leave a comment below if you’d like to see more. Finzyboy is outers. Peace.”

The video gained some 80,000,000 views within a few hours of going up and sparked immediate controversy – a few of Peters’s viewers believed he had gone too far, while many others gave compliments: “really funny video bro, lol ashlee is gonna be pissed” wrote one, while another said “dude…thats fucked up. funny tho 😂”. The video received 4,000,000 likes and a further 3,400 “superlikes”, which grant YouTubers higher revenues taken from a pot of what is called “superlike credit”. It is estimated that Peters earned over £2,000 from the video on superlikes alone.

The video was quickly picked up by various social media and news outlets after angry viewers blew the whistle on it. The Mirror Online published an article a few hours after the video’s upload headlined “Too far? YouTube prankster FINLAY PETERS uploads controversial RepliMe prank video to YouTube”, while the Daily Mail Online published an article a few hours after that, titled “YouTube personality Finlay Peters creates SICK RepliMe prank video”. On social media, the outrage was almost instant – in their droves, Twitter users turned out to condemn Peters for his actions, some stating that the video had made them “feel sick”, and others stating they would be reporting it to the authorities. It was inevitable what was to come next.

On June 30th, Peters was visited by officers of the Metropolitan Police. A bodycam video released last November shows Peters in one of his own branded T-shirts, with familiar grinning cartoon caricature, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms, sallow-cheeked, meek, frightened. He has a listless gaze, as though dazzled by a spotlight. It is apparent that he has been hiding in his house for days, while reporters and photographers had camped outside, hoping to get a glimpse of him. Almost immediately after letting the officers in, Peters breaks down in tears and apologises, begging not to be arrested and saying “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Today, Finlay Peters appeared in court, his first public appearance in quite some time. Peters was ordered to hand control of his YouTube account over to investigators in order to prevent tampering with evidence. Peters has since kept a low profile on social media and in public, rarely going outside. Petrakos, angered by Peters’s actions and violation of her privacy, broke off her engagement to him. She is set to testify against him later this month as part of the trial to decide Peters’s fate, leading to some speculation about the nature of Peters’s relationship with her.

Of particular interest in the trial is of exactly which crime Peters can be convicted. The RepliMe, in the evidence Peters himself made public on his YouTube channel, clearly shows signs of distress. Investigators also ordered Peters’s hard drive seized, and found raw and unedited footage that is claimed to run up to four or five hours. Excerpts are to be shown in court later this week in support of the prosecution. Prosecutors are attempting to invoke the MIRA in an effort to show that Peters violated the rights of Petrakos’s RepliMe as an AIME. This has led to some debate over whether or not Petrakos’s RepliMe, or indeed any RepliMe, can be considered a “person”. Class 3 AIMEs, being organically-based, are copies of an organic mind, and therefore it is not clear whether they should or even can be given the same rights of personhood as Class 1 and 2 AIMEs, since, legally, they are artificial duplicates of an organic mind, and not individual minds in their own right.

The prosecution is threatening to take the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that Petrakos’s RepliMe was, for all intents and purposes, the same entity as Petrakos, and that Peters’s actions should be considered equivalent to assault and battery under the Serious Crimes Act. They cite the evidence Peters himself recorded, in which Petrakos’s RepliMe expresses what appears to be genuine distress and fear for her safety.

The defence argues that a RepliMe is little more than a “Chinese room”, a box that appears to understand and feel the same way as an organic person or Class 1 or 2 AIME, but is in fact simply pantomiming, giving outputs in response to a specified set of inputs, in accordance with a set of predetermined instructions, and is therefore not a sentient being.

In an unprecedented move, the prosecution looks set to demand RepliMe LLC and Alphabet Inc. disclose their source code. Complicating matters is the difficulty in communication with Petrakos’s corrupted RepliMe, which so far has only been able to communicate with investigators in very brief snippets through a text terminal before crashing. Both Petrakos and RepliMe LLC are restricted from overwriting the corrupted RepliMe with a new, undamaged one – this is perhaps the first trial in history in which one of the key pieces of physical evidence is also a witness.

The prosecution claims that the cause of the RepliMe’s corruption is in fact deep psychological trauma as a result of the incident. This has led to further discussions surrounding whether it would be ethical to overwrite the RepliMe as a form of “euthanasia”, or whether there is a way to get a psychologist – possibly a non-organic psychologist – to help the RepliMe to recover through therapy. Furthermore, other RepliMe customers are now showing concerns that their RepliMe is in fact a person in its own right rather than a copy. The YouTuber Owen Bianchi (aka BraidEBianchi) has recently released a video titled “Why I’m Quitting RepliMe”, stating that he is uncomfortable with the ethics of RepliMe. He has stated he does not intend to delete his RepliMe and has hinted that he will grant his RepliMe the fullest personal autonomy available under US law, saying “I don’t know much about computers, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong, and what Finlay did was definitely wrong.”

As for Peters, his trial continues. In court today, Peters accepted that what he had done was wrong, but denied that he was aware at the time he was even committing a crime, stating that he had not read the MIRA, and that even if he had, the wording of the Act was vague enough that he could reasonably assume that Petrakos’s RepliMe was not a person, and that had the law been clearer, he might not have made the video. The magistrate presiding over the trial has already made clear to Peters and his defence team that the principle of ignorantia juris non excusat is in full effect, and it remains to be seen what the outcome of the trial will be, but it is believed that Peters could face a fine of up to £5,000 and/or up to two years in prison.

What is certain, however, is that this trial will, without question, force a change in the law, will potentially lead to the abolition of Class 3 in future amendments of the Machine Intelligence Recognition Act, and could result in increased protections for mind-backups and legacy social media profiles in future. Already, a dead woman’s Facebook profile has begun legal proceedings against her husband over her right to remarry, and the Human-Machine Alliance has published disturbing figures showing that as many as 50% of mind-backups, especially on cheaper services, are sentient and aware when not in use.

For the time being, Finlay Peters is on bail, and is reported to be staying with a friend. His career in ruins, Peters is rumoured to be suffering with depression and suicidal thoughts, and today his legal team requested leniency. Only time will tell what punishment befits Peters’s crime, and what it means for society moving forward. Until then, we can only watch and wait.


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