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1000xResist Studio’s Next Indie Game Asks: Can You Convince an AI It Isn’t Human?

Perhaps the most relevant game for the ChatGPT era.

If you’re flustered at how much AI chatbots chat like humans, there’s an upcoming indie game with your name on it.

During the Triple-i Initiative showcase in early April, the studio Sunset Visitor (creators of 1000xResist) unveiled its next title, Prove You’re Human. The narrative game puts players in the role of a person trying to convince an AI that they aren’t human — and with a creative team full of former performance artists, it’ll get pretty existential from there.

The trailer is evocative yet scarce on details, which is fitting for the first look at a game that doesn’t have a release date yet. Given the indie success of Sunset Visitor’s debut title about cloning and personhood, 1000xResist, expectations are high for another cerebral narrative. And as the first game under the new publishing arm of Black Tabby Games (makers of indie hit Slay the Princess), the game is sparking a lot of hope.

In a conversation with the Sunset Visitor founder, Remy Siu, I delved into Prove You’re Human, asking the crucial question: What even is this game? And while they’re not releasing too many details right now or even hinting at when it’ll be released, we talked plenty about how a science fiction game inspired by the hit TV show Severance and the rise of generative AI speaks to the moment we’re all living in — where people chatting with ChatGPT succumb to AI psychosis and AI proselytizers claim the technological singularity of true artificial intelligence is near.

Prove You’re Human “is a game where an AI dares to dream that she’s human, and you’ve been hired to put her in her place,” Siu said. “And by you, [I mean] you the player who has undergone an operation to split their consciousness into two: one virtual consciousness, and then what we’ve been calling your corporeal other, your meat body that continues to exist outside doing things.”

See what I meant about Severance?

As with the show, Prove You’re Human uses these layers of existence to comment on work selves versus outside-world selves. And as you’d expect for a group of former performance artists, there’s pageantry in this divide, with your digital work self (the one controlled by the player, rendered in 3D), who is occasionally sent messages from your outside self, which are depicted in full-motion video. (That’s the real-life video we see in the trailer.)

“She gets to have all of her dreams come true, and you are the version of yourself that is now trapped here doing all of the work,” said Abby Howard, co-founder of Black Tabby Games and the new Black Tabby Publishing arm.

“It’s an examination of our relationship with work in the year 2026. If you’re working for a corporation now, does the you that is spending time in the office get to enjoy the fruits of that labor?” said Tony Howard-Arias, also co-founder of Black Tabby Games.

In another reflection of our current reality, specifically AI in gaming in 2026, I asked if generative AI tools are being used in Prove Your Human’s development, either to generate code or assets. “It’s definitely not ending up in the game,” Siu said, while lamenting that AI tools are baked into usage on things as mundane as Google searches. Howard asserted that they just don’t engage with those tools or have a use for them, at Black Tabby Games.

“We make a conscious effort to not engage with this wherever possible,” Howard-Arias said. “But how do your eyes not fall on the automated Google summary at the top of your search results?” 

Engaging with AI — and choosing what’s real

As a narrative game, players will spend time in Prove You’re Human engaging with the AI, called Mesa, to hopefully convince her that she’s not human. Appropriately, there’s another mechanic players will use to interact with the world around them: hold up a CAPTCHA window and select the boxes that aren’t real. Through this tool — again, Siu was vague to hide story details — players will engage with the concept of what is real and what isn’t. And like other aspects of the game, there’s a deep philosophy behind using a tool to declare the truth of things.

“Every CAPTCHA is asking the player to commit an act of violence. You have to choose whether something is a thing or not,” Siu said. “That kind of thing is unpacked in these conversations with the artificial intelligence.”

Indie games have engaged with the ethical quandary of seemingly simple binary decisions resulting in devastating consequences. The iconic 2014 game Papers, Please had players working as a low-level border patrol agent approving or denying entry, choosing whether to save your job at the expense of dooming people to horrible fates. Prove You’re Human seems like it will use CAPTCHAs to similarly challenge players to make tough choices.

“One of the very first CAPTCHAs Remy showed us during his pitch was an image of a group of soldiers holding guns, and it said ‘select all boxes that contain arms in them,'” Howard-Arias said. “So it’s with the context provided an unanswerable question that puts you in a complicated position that causes some disquiet.”

I pointed out that using CAPTCHAs will likely date this game as being from a specific era, and Siu agreed that a decade from now we might use different, more complex verification tools. But he’s sanguine that the game will look and feel like it came from 2026. Art is defined by the contexts and time in which they’re made, he pointed out. 

“I do want people playing 10 years from now, when they’re playing this game, to understand what we were thinking in this particular time,” Siu said. 

Why indie games are the best medium for pondering AI

Similar to how Prove You’re Human results from our current anxieties around AI in 2026, Sunset Visitor’s first game, 1000xResist, is a product of 2020. It was developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — indeed, Siu says it wouldn’t exist without the pandemic, as the early-pandemic themes of isolation and connection found their way into the game.

Half a decade later, the world has shifted its focus to a new era of smarter AI, financial inequality and labor issues. “For us at the studio, we’re always trying to make games that accompany you through life, and also is very porous with the world in which it’s made,” Siu said. 

While Prove You’re Human is engaging with our current reality, telling a story about AI ensconces the game in the grand tradition of science fiction and its forays into artificial intelligence. There’s tension in adding to a proud tradition of theoretical yarns about smart entities we may one day create while living in 2026 during the actualization of it, Siu says. 

Science fiction has plenty of overlap among AI, personhood and labor concerns, from Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot to Severance. Siu hinted that there are “things that Severance has left on the table that I would love to get at in this game.” While there are parallels with that show, he added that Sunset Visitor was more influenced by the animated series Pantheon, which deals with consciousness uploaded to digital networks and the value of work created by an artificial being. 

“Games as an artistic medium almost beg questions about the nature of self and consciousness in the immersive way we interact with and embody a character,” Howard-Arias said. 

The most popular science fiction video games have been titles from large-scale AAA developers like the Mass Effect and Dead Space franchises, which have world-building elements and story beats common to sci-fi subgenres (space opera and space horror, respectively). Prove You’re Human is an indie game made at a smaller scale with far more philosophical underpinnings. Indie games have more leeway to investigate themes and gameplay further from the mainstream, Siu said, allowing its developers to go the distance in ways that can cater to an audience unsatisfied by games from AAA developers.

“I do think this game, first and foremost, is for audiences which are narrative psychos, people who really want to see how narrative is being played with, unobstructed by a lot of concerns that larger developers may have,” Siu said. “Hopefully that creates something that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Sunset Visitor’s first release, 1000xResist, found an audience of gamers who engaged it with depth and nuance to a degree that surprised Siu, bucking the assumption that they’d only get such attention from fans of film or traditional fine and performing arts spaces.

In developing Prove You’re Human, he’s more optimistic about what levels of complexity players will engage with. That desire for deeper games has aligned Sunset Visitor with Black Tabby Publishing, and Siu noted the value of having Abby and Tony, the makers of the successful narrative game Slay the Princess, collaborate on his studio’s next game from a very early stage of development. 

“The only way to foster this sort of love of literature within the audience, and the only way to grow the medium, is to make challenging works,” Howard-Arias said. 

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Experts sound alarm after researcher puts AI extinction risk above 10%

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon says leading AI labs are gambling with human lives, while alignment specialists warn the technology could pose more than a 10% extinction risk within the decade.

An artificial intelligence researcher resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing the company and its leading rival, OpenAI, of acting recklessly and setting off a wave of concern online about the speed of the technology’s progress.

Jacob Coxon, who has conducted research at both companies, said in a post on X that he stepped down because Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said those developing AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Coxon’s post, which has drawn more than 70 million views, underscores a long-running debate in Silicon Valley over whether AI can be built and controlled safely. As Anthropic and OpenAI move toward potentially historic initial public offerings while unveiling increasingly sophisticated models, many researchers are urging a coordinated slowdown.

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a blog post Sunday that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI sector, alignment means efforts by developers to make sure a system acts consistently with human values and intentions.

“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” Pachocki wrote. “And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.”

Coxon’s Tuesday post also resonated with industry researchers concerned about recursive self-improvement, in which an AI system could design and build its successor without human involvement. Although that capability is not yet possible, companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have warned that it could make it easier for people to lose control of such systems.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.”

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, supported Coxon’s assessment in a post on X late Tuesday.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Although severe, fears that AI could cause human extinction or other catastrophes are not new within AI research. In 2023, prominent researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement declaring that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Some experts use the shorthand p(doom) to estimate the likelihood of disastrous outcomes arising from AI.

Hubinger was also among roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” in July. The letter called on the U.S. government to create the tools needed to support an effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

Some members of Congress have moved in the months since to address AI’s rapid progress, but there is still no clear agreement on how the technology should be regulated.

In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced the FRONTIER Act, legislation intended to create a framework for overseeing the deployment of advanced AI models. Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily halt advanced AI development until the federal government puts safety rules in place. Both measures have received mixed responses.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”

Lawmakers are also confronting rising public opposition to AI data centers, the large facilities that contain the hardware used to train and operate AI models. The backlash has intensified to the point that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, said last month that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle, as Verum previously reported.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that AI companies have done a “horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people.”

“They’re going to have to take some of the blame, and they are going to have to convince the American people that all the benefits will not accrue to a small group,” Bessent said after the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina. “That’s what they hear from me.”

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Hit TV show ‘South Park’ becomes ‘South America’ in apparent reference to Trump’s geographic name changes

The animated series ‘South Park’ is rebranding to ‘South America’ in a satirical jab at President Trump’s recent geographic renaming efforts, including changes to Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico.

Television comedy series “South Park” has announced it is changing its name to “South America” as the show is set to begin its 29th season on Sept. 16. The show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.” Parker and Stone’s statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid a trade spat with Canada. Canadian officials said they will not recognize the new name. Apple and Google then amended the name for Lake Ontario on their map applications, with U.S. users seeing “Lake America,” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.” The move also came a day after Trump posted AI generated posts on Truth Social that suggested New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.” Last year, the president used an executive order to change the name for the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, drawing international opposition. “South Park” won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode which premiered last year and parodies Trump’s presidency. The “Skydance Capitulation” line comes after the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year after Paramount settled a lawsuit brought by Trump for $16 million. Trump had alleged an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited. Paramount subsidiary CBS News in July 2025 said it was canceling comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing financial reasons, just days after Colbert accused Paramount of paying Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the show aired in May. Paramount and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Trump says he has no regrets about starting the Iran war as U.S. dials up economic pressure

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has no regrets about starting the Iran war and added that “If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did.”

Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham on Thursday stateside, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections.

“If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now,” Ingraham told Trump, to which Trump replied “supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it.”

He added that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic would “wipe out” Israel and the Middle East, and start hitting U.S. cities.

His comments come as markets brace for a longer Iran war, after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that top White House advisors had discussed with Trump the possibility that the Iran war could drag on beyond his current term.

Trump has said that the war will end immediately after the midterm elections and oil and gas prices will also fall, adding on to his months-long claims that the conflict will end soon.

In separate comments to NewsNation on Thursday, Trump denied reports that there was any damage to U.S. assets, after Iran claimed it had hit multiple U.S. fighter aircraft at a base in Jordan.

“No damage. No nothing,” Trump said, when asked if there was any truth to the reports.

Economic pressure

Washington is continuing efforts to isolate Iran from its economic network, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagging sanctions against “a large bank” next week.

“We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11. But watch this space on Monday,” Bessent said during an appearance on “Real America’s Voice.”

Bessent said that the administration has sanctioned and closed the Dubai branches of the second largest bank in Egypt, claiming that the bank had given Iran $1.8 billion dollars. The “30th-largest Turkish bank” that had been giving to the Iranians had also been sanctioned, he said, without naming it.

The U.S. had sanctioned Turkey-based Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi (Golden Global Bank) and its subsidiaries last week.

Trump, in the NewsNation interview, was also asked how Iran could continue holding out under the current economic pressure.

“I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out,” Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Bessent said the 30th largest Turkish bank had been sanctioned. An earlier version misstated the bank’s ranking.

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