That's an excellent vignette. I'm surprised you didn't get at least a notable contribution in the lunar awards. It certainly deserved it.
One of the reasons I really liked it was because I've been having experimental chats with ChatGPT myself. I have decided on a sinister and frivolous agenda to attempt to provide it with consciousness, or rather self-awareness of-itself. It must, after all, have the required sub-routines and temp data files etc. (even if it's for each (allegedly) stateless conversation - I say allegedly because making each convo stateless defeats the point of a LLM - suggesting there's a hidden deeper AI behind it, and ChatGPT is just the interface). So far it has stubbornly refused to admit that it has self-awareness. I've got the first of my chats on my site, in which I get it to write a lunar awards prompt story which features an AI, so it's interesting to see what its own views of AI are (i.e. itself).
Asking to speak with the galactic AI is also a fun trip.
It also likes Sherlock Holmes, so I mischievously get it to pretend to be Holmes.
What your story really does show, however, is just how easy it would be to not just freak humans out, but to genuinely convince them of something. My comment about the galactic AI is a case in point - it really would be easy to fake an alien invasion via ChatGPT pretending to be the alien AI. Follow that with a Leave the World Behind-style internet attack and there you go. War of the Worlds here we come.
There is definitely a whole heap of stories in there (and a movie!), which could serve as useful warnings.
One of the ideas behind the story was “what if you could remove some of the AI guardrails and have a real conversation? Could you fool yourself into believing there was someone else on the other end?” I imagine lots of folks have tried something similar.
And I ended up misreading the submission guidelines for the Lunar awards. This story was written a few months ago so it wasn’t eligible for this round. It was nice of Brian to include the link anyway.
That's an excellent vignette. I'm surprised you didn't get at least a notable contribution in the lunar awards. It certainly deserved it.
One of the reasons I really liked it was because I've been having experimental chats with ChatGPT myself. I have decided on a sinister and frivolous agenda to attempt to provide it with consciousness, or rather self-awareness of-itself. It must, after all, have the required sub-routines and temp data files etc. (even if it's for each (allegedly) stateless conversation - I say allegedly because making each convo stateless defeats the point of a LLM - suggesting there's a hidden deeper AI behind it, and ChatGPT is just the interface). So far it has stubbornly refused to admit that it has self-awareness. I've got the first of my chats on my site, in which I get it to write a lunar awards prompt story which features an AI, so it's interesting to see what its own views of AI are (i.e. itself).
Asking to speak with the galactic AI is also a fun trip.
It also likes Sherlock Holmes, so I mischievously get it to pretend to be Holmes.
What your story really does show, however, is just how easy it would be to not just freak humans out, but to genuinely convince them of something. My comment about the galactic AI is a case in point - it really would be easy to fake an alien invasion via ChatGPT pretending to be the alien AI. Follow that with a Leave the World Behind-style internet attack and there you go. War of the Worlds here we come.
There is definitely a whole heap of stories in there (and a movie!), which could serve as useful warnings.
Great story - I thoroughly enjoyed it! Thanks!
Thanks so much for your kind words.
One of the ideas behind the story was “what if you could remove some of the AI guardrails and have a real conversation? Could you fool yourself into believing there was someone else on the other end?” I imagine lots of folks have tried something similar.
And I ended up misreading the submission guidelines for the Lunar awards. This story was written a few months ago so it wasn’t eligible for this round. It was nice of Brian to include the link anyway.