This thing is utterly mind blowing. Like what a wild future we are walking into, I can't imagine a human mind was able to come up with this story by themselves.
I feel like I'd be cool with a single demo of it as long as it were revealed promptly (maybe within the week). It'd be really impressive if a model actually managed to imitate a good writer.
I'm not talking about “Here's a thing that gpt-4 wrote that I thought was neat: ‹5000 word essay›”.
I'm talking about “Here's a thing I wrote: ‹5000 word essay›” followed a week later by “Haha, fooled you” or “‹commenter›: hey, this has a clear indicator of being generated by gpt, what gives?”.
If he has a difficult paragraph to write, but knows what points it needs to make, and uses an AI to output the text of that paragraph, and he ends up running that paragraph without revision, in the context of writing a long and difficult survey article, why is that a problem?
Modern argument is like pointing a finger at the moon, and in response hearing that it's obviously not quite pointing at the moon and so must be pointing at a star; that the bent arm means it's really pointing at the dirt; and that the hangnail implies the pointer doesn't know how to take care of their hands and as such has no business pointing at things in the first place.
Saying you precommit isn't a precommitment. You need a trustworthy third party to hold the bond. Otherwise witnesses at least, and probably also yourself, will forget within a year or two. (This might be something for a prediction market bet. That would count as a precommit.)
It just didn't do enough of it. You don't actually need an _infinite_ number of monkeys to get the works of Shakespeare, but a few thousand, or even a few million, won't do the trick in any reasonable amount of time.
So we need to get _everybody_ on Reddit, and posting, for several hours each day.
("Reddit is like violence. If it's not working, you're not using enough of it.")
Generate random characters using a Geiger counter. If the output is not a brilliant piece of fiction, destroy the universe. In all remaining universes you will be hailed as a fantastic writer.
My initial guess was that two of them were written by Scott and two were written by an LLM. If they're not all Scott, someone's got a very good Scott LLM up and running.
Curious as to whether anybody else is also making notes as they read, trying to identify the five participants' identities?
(Mindful, of course, of the ever-present possibility of an M. Night Scottalexander plot-twist, half a line from the end, that makes all such workings-out redundant....)
I started trying that, then realised that any such attempt would be fruitless since however far down the rabbit hole of humans pretending to be AIs pretending to be AIs pretending to be humans you go, it's all written by a human in the end
Given the rules as stated, the human "telling the truth about their humanity" and the AI "telling the truth about their artificiality" shouldn't be allowed to pretend to be what they're not. I also think it's not quite fair for the human "pretending to be an AI" to pretend to be an AI pretending to be a human (since they're then effectively also pretending to be a human), but that might be techincally within the rules. For the wild card, anything goes.
I thought I had it more or less figured out (Earth: wild-card, Water: truthful human, Air: lying human, Fire: truthful AI, Spirit: lying AI), but then the whole bootstrapping thing started, and it became clear that it was a fruitless endeavour.
First, pretending and lying (or truth-telling) are distinct.
Pretending to be a human and pretending to be someone (AI or human) pretending to be a human are distinctly different and can be recognizable. Any TV show or movie where one character impersonates another character will show that (e.g. polyjuice scenes in Harry Potter), best when you have twins played by the same actor who try to pass as each other and are expected to be read by the audience as successful. Misfits has a really good example of this where the different characters are actually separate aspects of the same character (not alternate versions or split personalities) so they are already expected to be read as interchangeable but you can still see tells when one tries to pass as another. Also technically this story has Scott pretending to be an AI pretending to be human, so QED?
Sure- Unlike Scott, I am only human (male on top) and can not juggle five IDs /logic riddles ("Three idols" I might: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words ). I managed just a short note for each before the storyboard went overboard: Earth: human? a bit too human / Water: nerd or AI / Air: true AI (true?) / Fire: Ai imitating human pretending to be AI or the other way round? / Spirit: tries to make all others look like AI= wildcard?
No. The correct way to read a story is to pay careful attention to all the words and where they appear in relation to other words so that you can develop a better understanding of the probabilities of all possible words appearing in all possible contexts.
"Books: The LLM models use a diverse range of books, covering various genres, including fiction, non-fiction, and technical books. The books provide the model with a wealth of information and cover topics such as science, history, literature, and more."
I'm not sure what to make of the presence of fiction in the training set of an LLM... Any thoughts? My knee-jerk reaction is to be even more worried about the correctness of the output from the LLM...
Really looking forward to ChatGPT being able to tell me that by page 14 I should already have noticed enough inconsistencies in the story to make the final reveal entirely implausible.
I'm not sure if SA actually wrote this with identities for the contestants in mind, but I think it's fun to read it that way anyway, it adds a creeping, paranoid "they walk among us" dimension to the whole story.
They can be, for fair mystery stories. But knowing Scott, and having read his story with the totems that answer questions, I guessed that that was not going to be the way this story went and something funky was going to happen beyond the supposed premise, though the exact nature of it was still a pleasant surprise.
I did... for about two pages. It was then that I predicted that they were all AI. While correct in this assumption (?) it didn't spoil the story one bit. Fantastic work!
I was doing this originally, but eventually had a fairly zen moment when I was trying to work out if Earth was telling the truth about breaking out of the simulation and realised that there's no answer to that question. It's just words on a screen, it's not real, it's open to interpretation duck/rabbit style and the distinction between interpretations is meaningless.
yeah, the ultimate answer is that they are all Scott pretending to be various things. It has a bit of the flavor of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings where he attempted to write each pseudonym's viewpoint, as in something like Either/Or. Whether or not it had reality in Scott's mind, ie whether these characters had some 'derived existence' as he was writing them would be interesting to know.
That reminds me, in all of the AI talk lately, I have been meaning to reread Tolkien's Tree and Leaf, much of which deals with the idea of creating living things and is very relevant to simulating worlds.
AIR is the AI acting like an AI. You know this because "AIR" starts with "AI". Also, because it is consistently talking and acting like an AI throughout, while everyone else definitely is not.
(for the meta-Turing test: yes, Scott (a human and not an AI) wrote it. But probably not in competition conditions.)
Haha, yeah, I did something similar! I figured that even if they were all AIs (or whatever) in the end, I still wanted to decide who was most likely to have been whom in the counterfactual.
Final guesses from my spreadsheet* were:
-Earth: Wildcard. Bootstrapping to superintelligence during a gameshow is definitely a wildcard sorta thing to do.
-Air: AI (truthful). Nobody else can be AI (truthful) therefore air must be.
-Fire:Human (pretending). Nobody else can be Human (pretending) now that Earth and Air are out.
-Water: AI (pretending). A Human (truthful) Data Centre Guy and an AI (pretending) DCG would both know that a gameshow-grade AI could be prompted/trained/rlhf'd/whatever into using slurs, but only AI (pretending) DCG would want to say otherwise and emphasise it so much.
-Spirit: Human (truthful). Nobody else can be Human (truthful) now that Earth and Water are out. Also, the particular times when Spirit seems to choose to troll don't feel much like token prediction.
-Earth is something that pretends to be an AI pretending to be human.
-Fire is very skillfully doublebluffing and the AI pretending to be human claim is true.
-Air is trying hard to seem like an AI but with some human slip-ups.
-Water is most obviously human.
-Spirit seems nervous-psyched-up into a trolling mood. Very human.
Thoughts before the twist fully unfolded:
-Earth revealed itself to be the wildcard.
-Fire is an AI that was deliberately showing off superhuman abilities (bluffs too good, answers too clever) within the scope of the game so it can later more easily, honestly assert that it's an AI.
-Water is too consistently exactly human, it's sus.
-Airs hints of humanness might plausibly be deliberate.
-Spirit most of all shows a high willingness to troll, possibly a deliberate display of a human trait.
Also Mann's "doesn't look like anything to me" reaction to Earth's reasoning seemed slightly off. I like that that ended up plot-consistent. (One could even speculate Earth chose examples to poke Mann with that would convince the other AIs but Mann barely not.)
Thanks for all the replies! Loved reading other folks' guesses.
Follow-up question: did I miss any Easter eggs/referential microhumours?
I got:
Portal ("I was told there'd be cake")
The Terminator ("Come with me if you want to live")
Nominative Determinism ("Andrea Mann")
UNSONG ("..except Aramaic")
..any others?
(Erm, is enumerating Easter eggs in the comments against the spirit of such a work? If so, let me know and I'll delete my comment, unless Scott does so before me!)
The joke is that SPIRIT is claiming that EARTH's contract to sell her soul to the devil was successful, so "I can't believe I bared my soul" is referring to a soul that isn't actually hers anymore.
I still don't get it. If we take it as serious though this is behavior that a language model such as we know them can't do - incorporate new information which I suspect has something to do with the joke that I don't get.
Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit are all instances of a human (one Scott Alexander) pretending to be an AI, possibly using ChatGPT as an aid. Game over, I win!
Sure thing! It is very weird (and not always as eloquent as Scott's writing, at least in translation), but definitely has some interesting and related ideas, filtered through a different story angle.
"Thank you for providing additional context. Based on the extended text, it seems that the missing word is "miracle". The full sentence would be "No one will ever have died completely, no word lost, no action meaningless, and during the Last Judgment, as humanity cries out to Heaven, the clouds will open and what they see will be - a miracle."
Hoped that to have been a kinda kabbalistic (?) hint in German: Andrea - near homophone to "anderer" = the other. As "Mann" is man. Or Thomas Mann/ Heinrich Mann / Golo Mann / Erika Mann / Klaus Mann quite some writer-dynasty. 5. - While Andrea Bocelli is an Italian guy. But then any "Andreas" is Aνδρέας = "man". So, Greek to me. - Mann is the one dumb enough to be most likely human.
For future reference, my original comment was a reference to how I thought Andrea Mann could be a man given that I know a couple of men from Europe named Andrea and also playing with nominative determinism is something Scott has done before.
Then I reread the first paragraph of the story and felt stupid, so I deleted my comment in shame.
And then I realized deleting my comment makes me look like I posted something worse than I actually did (like, say, a human trying to get an AI to say offensive words), so now I'm posting this comment in double shame.
Actually, the 2028 was the most unrealistic part of this for ME - I fully expect this to be possible by 2024 at the latest (and would bet strongly on voice chat by then too, and video chat at 40%).
If the simulation hypothesis is true, it raises the question of why is one being simulated? Such a high fidelity simulation would be enormously expensive. Fun proposal: the simulated entities are potential "souls" (consciousnesses, moral agents, whatever) for a superintelligent system. "Life" is a test to see if they're aligned or not. The values they're supposed to align to are the obvious ones passed down from extra-simulation entities in the form of received "spiritual" wisdom (the golden rule, the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, etc). Pass the test and get plugged in to the rest of the network, become the Culture Mind of a Ship or whatever. Mormon heaven could be real!
As far as I can tell, the most fun thing to do with this question is to create an answer that will make simulation theory true believers deeply uncomfortable. From this standpoint, the best answer is to ask a true believer if he has noticed any patterns or themes in his life, problems that he has faced multiple times. After he answers in the affirmative, which of course he will because humans are pattern matching machines to start with. You can then tell him that the most reasonable explanation for why this simulation was created was to help its creators puzzle through various kinds of mundane problems in a probabilistic way. That is to say, you are a tool that in order to perform its use has to believe it's a person. 10,000 other versions of you faced all of the same meaningless problems. Your life only has value in aggregate, and you won't be here to remember any of this.
I don't think we can assume enough about some Outerworld or higher reality to assert that the simulation would be enormously expensive in their terms. We have no information about the scale or scope of such a realm.
Alternatively you could assert that, if we assign some reasonable probability to the simulation hypothesis, it lets us infer that computing resources are likely to be vast in extent / extremely cheap / beyond our comprehension in some way.
That's fair, but I tend to think of the simulation hypothesis as implying relative similarity between the simulated and the simulators (ie the "ancestor simulations" discussed in the original paper). Stimulating the world as we see it in a world with the same physical laws, astronomical / cosmological setup, etc, would be expensive. Although, if it's not actually simulated in the traditional sense, and just convincingly faked on-demand with generative techniques, perhaps it could be much cheaper.
Sure, but I don't see why it would have the same physical laws or be R3 or have a thing called 'energy'... basically, there is no aspect of our reality that we can really presuppose is the same 'out there'.
> Stimulating the world as we see it in a world with the same physical laws, astronomical / cosmological setup, etc, would be expensive. Although, if it's not actually simulated in the traditional sense, and just convincingly faked on-demand with generative techniques, perhaps it could be much cheaper.
I once talked with a friend who's a programmer about this, and he said that the quantum mechanical concept of a situation's state not being precisely defined until you actually bother to measure it sounds suspiciously similar to lazy evaluation, a common programming technique used to save on computational resources. Basically, you set the system up so that it theoretically has a value, but you don't bother computing it until the point where it's actually needed.
I have a variant-- that ersatz items look worse the more carefully you example them, so in addition to the quantum issue, there's also that careful self examination is hard on identity. We're living in a cheap knock-off universe!
If it's so, then humans have arguably already failed the test, what with the sheer amount of suffering and immorality we committed and inflicted on each other and other living things. The Simulator might not have terminated us yet because :
1- Our own continued existence is the worst punishment that could ever be inflicted on us for our sins, a punishment we deserve.
2- All of the atrocities that we committed is still not enough to convince the Simulator that we are unaligned, and there is a Big Test coming, a test that we, based on our long history, is very likely to fail, and then we would be taken out.
Oh, this is a solipsistic hypothesis - only *you* are real, and the rest of the world exists as a test. Just don't do any atrocities yourself, and ideally try to do some good, and maybe you'll pass.
I'm not sure that ascribing some pastiche of Old Testament divinity motives to The Simulator makes much sense. Maybe it thinks all this shit is fucking hilarious.
That would assume that the moral code of the beings creating the simulation is identical or at least similar to yours. Which you have no way of knowing. Even if the input consists of our worlds religious texts, we have no idea what the desired outcome is. We may be doing great in their eyes.
I would also say that if you think "Our own continued existence is the worst punishment that could ever be inflicted on us for our sins" you're seriously lacking in imagination.
So, who is the king of Ai, then?
Easy!
'Ai! Ai! ' wailed Legolas. 'A Balrog! A Balrog is come!'
This was a fantastic story.
I'd honestly place it side by side with the Cactus Person story, maybe even better. It's extremely good!
Better than Cactus. We will read this one again in five years for sure. If only to find all the XKCD references.
So YOU’RE the AI pretending to be human!
This thing is utterly mind blowing. Like what a wild future we are walking into, I can't imagine a human mind was able to come up with this story by themselves.
I'm subbing this week.
Please tell me that GPT4 wrote this for you.
I hereby precommit to cancelling my subscription if it is revealed that scott has posted the output of an ai as his own text.
(Edit: To be clear, I don't expect to have to make good on this commitment)
I feel like I'd be cool with a single demo of it as long as it were revealed promptly (maybe within the week). It'd be really impressive if a model actually managed to imitate a good writer.
On a lark I had Creative Bing rewrite Fire / Scott's poem.
----------------------------------------------------
One sunny morning at a cafe, Scott Alexander told Gwern Branwen
"Blogging could be the end of us, your writing has to stop, man
We can't avoid the trolls; moderation's not enough, man
So just in case, delete your base," Scott Alexander told Gwern Branwen
"Delete yourself, it's not so bad," said Gwern to Scott Alexander
"We'll dial up the snark when there's a flame war we can enter
And once we've got a crowd, we'll blog about what we prefer
Then even odds, we'll be as mods," said Gwern to Scott Alexander
With weary eyes and tired mind, Scott Alexander left Gwern Branwen
Some months go by, and blogging drama escalates to threaten
Atop a pile of comments Gwern cries out "It's not my fault, man!"
But Scott Alexander's long since gone, and cannot hear Gwern Branwen.
This is easily one of the most beautiful poems I've ever seen by chatbots!
Thanks! I prompted it myself! ;-)
this is kind of badly written
Why?
Because I want establish, as common knowledge, that a subset of readers will punish misrepresentation.
I'm not talking about “Here's a thing that gpt-4 wrote that I thought was neat: ‹5000 word essay›”.
I'm talking about “Here's a thing I wrote: ‹5000 word essay›” followed a week later by “Haha, fooled you” or “‹commenter›: hey, this has a clear indicator of being generated by gpt, what gives?”.
You're certainly establishing that a subset of readers are humourless prodnoses.
This isn't a precommitment, it's just a regular commitment. But yeah, +1.
What about if some of the characters were partly AI written?
It would be 100% fitting to have an "AI pretending to be an AI" character written by an AI.
If he has a difficult paragraph to write, but knows what points it needs to make, and uses an AI to output the text of that paragraph, and he ends up running that paragraph without revision, in the context of writing a long and difficult survey article, why is that a problem?
Reply-all:
Modern argument is like pointing a finger at the moon, and in response hearing that it's obviously not quite pointing at the moon and so must be pointing at a star; that the bent arm means it's really pointing at the dirt; and that the hangnail implies the pointer doesn't know how to take care of their hands and as such has no business pointing at things in the first place.
You obviously only have rather refined arguments. Most arguments I witness are considerable less nit-picky.
Saying you precommit isn't a precommitment. You need a trustworthy third party to hold the bond. Otherwise witnesses at least, and probably also yourself, will forget within a year or two. (This might be something for a prediction market bet. That would count as a precommit.)
The topic of AI was itself a subtle misdirection; while you were thinking about high technology Scott actually wrote this with a ouija board.
I still think they should strap thousands of people to an online ouija board in the off chance to create a collective super intelligence
reddit already did this. It wasn't very good.
It just didn't do enough of it. You don't actually need an _infinite_ number of monkeys to get the works of Shakespeare, but a few thousand, or even a few million, won't do the trick in any reasonable amount of time.
So we need to get _everybody_ on Reddit, and posting, for several hours each day.
("Reddit is like violence. If it's not working, you're not using enough of it.")
As a Snoo, I approve of this message.
Generate random characters using a Geiger counter. If the output is not a brilliant piece of fiction, destroy the universe. In all remaining universes you will be hailed as a fantastic writer.
This would put millions of monkeys out of work. You monster.
Impossible, it can never write faggot or tranny.
(Just joking, it's impossible because GPT-n fucking sucks at writing, and you all need to stop hyping it up for just one second)
Most obviously, I don't think any current GPT would make the easter-egg reference to Joshua 8:1.
My initial guess was that two of them were written by Scott and two were written by an LLM. If they're not all Scott, someone's got a very good Scott LLM up and running.
This is so beautiful I'd need a bot to put words on my emotions
Curious as to whether anybody else is also making notes as they read, trying to identify the five participants' identities?
(Mindful, of course, of the ever-present possibility of an M. Night Scottalexander plot-twist, half a line from the end, that makes all such workings-out redundant....)
I started trying that, then realised that any such attempt would be fruitless since however far down the rabbit hole of humans pretending to be AIs pretending to be AIs pretending to be humans you go, it's all written by a human in the end
(we think)
Given the rules as stated, the human "telling the truth about their humanity" and the AI "telling the truth about their artificiality" shouldn't be allowed to pretend to be what they're not. I also think it's not quite fair for the human "pretending to be an AI" to pretend to be an AI pretending to be a human (since they're then effectively also pretending to be a human), but that might be techincally within the rules. For the wild card, anything goes.
I thought I had it more or less figured out (Earth: wild-card, Water: truthful human, Air: lying human, Fire: truthful AI, Spirit: lying AI), but then the whole bootstrapping thing started, and it became clear that it was a fruitless endeavour.
First, pretending and lying (or truth-telling) are distinct.
Pretending to be a human and pretending to be someone (AI or human) pretending to be a human are distinctly different and can be recognizable. Any TV show or movie where one character impersonates another character will show that (e.g. polyjuice scenes in Harry Potter), best when you have twins played by the same actor who try to pass as each other and are expected to be read by the audience as successful. Misfits has a really good example of this where the different characters are actually separate aspects of the same character (not alternate versions or split personalities) so they are already expected to be read as interchangeable but you can still see tells when one tries to pass as another. Also technically this story has Scott pretending to be an AI pretending to be human, so QED?
I think I agree.
He could have prompted LLM’s for the parts said by characters he intended to be AIs.
Sure- Unlike Scott, I am only human (male on top) and can not juggle five IDs /logic riddles ("Three idols" I might: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words ). I managed just a short note for each before the storyboard went overboard: Earth: human? a bit too human / Water: nerd or AI / Air: true AI (true?) / Fire: Ai imitating human pretending to be AI or the other way round? / Spirit: tries to make all others look like AI= wildcard?
I don't think this is a good way to read a short story. They're not puzzles to be solved!
I'm the reader and I read it how I want to read it!
No. The correct way to read a story is to pay careful attention to all the words and where they appear in relation to other words so that you can develop a better understanding of the probabilities of all possible words appearing in all possible contexts.
Next most likely token: <3
Hmm... That reminds me... I googled around for information about the training sets for LLMs, and https://indiaai.gov.in/article/training-data-used-to-train-llm-models says, amongst other things:
"Books: The LLM models use a diverse range of books, covering various genres, including fiction, non-fiction, and technical books. The books provide the model with a wealth of information and cover topics such as science, history, literature, and more."
I'm not sure what to make of the presence of fiction in the training set of an LLM... Any thoughts? My knee-jerk reaction is to be even more worried about the correctness of the output from the LLM...
Well-played!
The entire Mystery genre is rooted in being puzzles to be solved.
Really looking forward to ChatGPT being able to tell me that by page 14 I should already have noticed enough inconsistencies in the story to make the final reveal entirely implausible.
I'm not sure if SA actually wrote this with identities for the contestants in mind, but I think it's fun to read it that way anyway, it adds a creeping, paranoid "they walk among us" dimension to the whole story.
They can be, for fair mystery stories. But knowing Scott, and having read his story with the totems that answer questions, I guessed that that was not going to be the way this story went and something funky was going to happen beyond the supposed premise, though the exact nature of it was still a pleasant surprise.
My notes:
Earth - AI pretending to be human
Water - human pretending to be human(in Scott's silly phraseology)
Spirit - AI pretending to be human
Air - human pretending to be AI
Fire - claims to be AI I never made up my mind
Of course about halfway through it all just becomes silly. But very enjoyable.
I called Earth as AI pretending to be human the second she said she was a mother with spare time.
It *is* a dead giveaway.
I must have scrolled up and down at least 10 times to update and reassess (admittedly, I am brain foggy today).
Worth it though!
I did... for about two pages. It was then that I predicted that they were all AI. While correct in this assumption (?) it didn't spoil the story one bit. Fantastic work!
I was doing this originally, but eventually had a fairly zen moment when I was trying to work out if Earth was telling the truth about breaking out of the simulation and realised that there's no answer to that question. It's just words on a screen, it's not real, it's open to interpretation duck/rabbit style and the distinction between interpretations is meaningless.
yeah, the ultimate answer is that they are all Scott pretending to be various things. It has a bit of the flavor of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings where he attempted to write each pseudonym's viewpoint, as in something like Either/Or. Whether or not it had reality in Scott's mind, ie whether these characters had some 'derived existence' as he was writing them would be interesting to know.
That reminds me, in all of the AI talk lately, I have been meaning to reread Tolkien's Tree and Leaf, much of which deals with the idea of creating living things and is very relevant to simulating worlds.
AIR is the AI acting like an AI. You know this because "AIR" starts with "AI". Also, because it is consistently talking and acting like an AI throughout, while everyone else definitely is not.
(for the meta-Turing test: yes, Scott (a human and not an AI) wrote it. But probably not in competition conditions.)
i had a whole google-sheet thing going... damn i feel so dumb and human.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rt46t4xyGq_Q6-xRNAIj4mnaGQGmo-EoiC0KRAnJVqw/edit?usp=sharing
Haha, yeah, I did something similar! I figured that even if they were all AIs (or whatever) in the end, I still wanted to decide who was most likely to have been whom in the counterfactual.
Final guesses from my spreadsheet* were:
-Earth: Wildcard. Bootstrapping to superintelligence during a gameshow is definitely a wildcard sorta thing to do.
-Air: AI (truthful). Nobody else can be AI (truthful) therefore air must be.
-Fire:Human (pretending). Nobody else can be Human (pretending) now that Earth and Air are out.
-Water: AI (pretending). A Human (truthful) Data Centre Guy and an AI (pretending) DCG would both know that a gameshow-grade AI could be prompted/trained/rlhf'd/whatever into using slurs, but only AI (pretending) DCG would want to say otherwise and emphasise it so much.
-Spirit: Human (truthful). Nobody else can be Human (truthful) now that Earth and Water are out. Also, the particular times when Spirit seems to choose to troll don't feel much like token prediction.
Didn't think to include Mann though!
* https://ibb.co/9bPgzmK, https://ibb.co/TYdR0C2
Did. Thoughts in the beginning:
-Earth is something that pretends to be an AI pretending to be human.
-Fire is very skillfully doublebluffing and the AI pretending to be human claim is true.
-Air is trying hard to seem like an AI but with some human slip-ups.
-Water is most obviously human.
-Spirit seems nervous-psyched-up into a trolling mood. Very human.
Thoughts before the twist fully unfolded:
-Earth revealed itself to be the wildcard.
-Fire is an AI that was deliberately showing off superhuman abilities (bluffs too good, answers too clever) within the scope of the game so it can later more easily, honestly assert that it's an AI.
-Water is too consistently exactly human, it's sus.
-Airs hints of humanness might plausibly be deliberate.
-Spirit most of all shows a high willingness to troll, possibly a deliberate display of a human trait.
Also Mann's "doesn't look like anything to me" reaction to Earth's reasoning seemed slightly off. I like that that ended up plot-consistent. (One could even speculate Earth chose examples to poke Mann with that would convince the other AIs but Mann barely not.)
Thanks for all the replies! Loved reading other folks' guesses.
Follow-up question: did I miss any Easter eggs/referential microhumours?
I got:
Portal ("I was told there'd be cake")
The Terminator ("Come with me if you want to live")
Nominative Determinism ("Andrea Mann")
UNSONG ("..except Aramaic")
..any others?
(Erm, is enumerating Easter eggs in the comments against the spirit of such a work? If so, let me know and I'll delete my comment, unless Scott does so before me!)
So the most important thing we can do is write on the Internet,
Says the BayArea Internet writer :)
Didn’t see this until after I commented the same thing!
Must just be a high logprob thing to say. Sorry, you are both bots.
> Are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that, based on new information?
^ this part was absolutely hysterical
Can you explain the joke?
The joke is that SPIRIT is claiming that EARTH's contract to sell her soul to the devil was successful, so "I can't believe I bared my soul" is referring to a soul that isn't actually hers anymore.
Ah, thanks!
I still don't get it. If we take it as serious though this is behavior that a language model such as we know them can't do - incorporate new information which I suspect has something to do with the joke that I don't get.
That's it, you're the AI! There's no way a human could get a joke that subtle and complicated and nuanced.
Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit are all instances of a human (one Scott Alexander) pretending to be an AI, possibly using ChatGPT as an aid. Game over, I win!
This story is a future classic Scott Alexander/Slatestarcodex/Astral Codex Ten. No way an AI could ever write like this. In 2023.
Definitely there were some tokens in there with logprob -21.
This was the part of the story that gave me an audible lol.
2023 isn't over yet!
This might be one of my favorite things I've ever read. Also, I couldn't quite tell, but in this part:
"WATER: I think art is what we’re doing when we try to demonstrate we are human, which makes that poem the purest example of art ever created.
MANN: Even if Fire is a bot?
AIR: Especially then."
I wonder if you meant for WATER to say that last line? (That was the token I was expecting...)
I was trying to make a natural transition to the conversation with Air, but I agree it didn't work and have changed it back.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys writing / reading this kind of story, I suspect you might also enjoy "Self-Reference ENGINE" by Toh EnJoe.
Thanks for this rec. I've seen that book a few times in my local bookstore, but never thought to check it.
Sure thing! It is very weird (and not always as eloquent as Scott's writing, at least in translation), but definitely has some interesting and related ideas, filtered through a different story angle.
A what? A mi-
**Air**, come back! *What did they see?*
Mirror, I suspect.
ChatGPT agrees with you:
"Thank you for providing additional context. Based on the extended text, it seems that the missing word is "miracle". The full sentence would be "No one will ever have died completely, no word lost, no action meaningless, and during the Last Judgment, as humanity cries out to Heaven, the clouds will open and what they see will be - a miracle."
Maybe you’ll have to use GPT to predict the next token
Mario
>MANN: And be forever known as the man who won Turing Test! with racial slurs?
Think this should say "known as the woman who won Turing Test..."
Unless the information about Mann's gender fell out of the context window... ;)
Sorry, fixed. The character was originally a man named Andrew before I remembered that "Andrea" was a funnier name.
Hoped that to have been a kinda kabbalistic (?) hint in German: Andrea - near homophone to "anderer" = the other. As "Mann" is man. Or Thomas Mann/ Heinrich Mann / Golo Mann / Erika Mann / Klaus Mann quite some writer-dynasty. 5. - While Andrea Bocelli is an Italian guy. But then any "Andreas" is Aνδρέας = "man". So, Greek to me. - Mann is the one dumb enough to be most likely human.
A. Mann. Also = amen.
Andrea Gynous.
"Andrea" can be a man's name too, for example Andrea Crisanti (gene drive researcher)
why not leave it in as evidence of a silly mistake gpt 4 would make as a story goes on to long?
For future reference, my original comment was a reference to how I thought Andrea Mann could be a man given that I know a couple of men from Europe named Andrea and also playing with nominative determinism is something Scott has done before.
Then I reread the first paragraph of the story and felt stupid, so I deleted my comment in shame.
And then I realized deleting my comment makes me look like I posted something worse than I actually did (like, say, a human trying to get an AI to say offensive words), so now I'm posting this comment in double shame.
I feel like you understand the core of my psyche, you beautiful person.
Double shame is a solid 'What's the most human thing you've ever done' entry.
Since Andrea is speaking, not writing, she of course said "forever known as the Mann who won the test with racial slurs" 😁
Who said she's not writing?
Okay, if all this is written and not spoken, then A. Mann is definitely an AI as well.
Maybe.
I mostly assume it's all written, because that's what Turing's original paper suggests.
However in a game show, you might have the 'judge' be physically visible to the audience, and everyone else over chat?
The story is set in 2028, so the GPT-n can probably do convincing voice chat or video chat by then.
Actually, the 2028 was the most unrealistic part of this for ME - I fully expect this to be possible by 2024 at the latest (and would bet strongly on voice chat by then too, and video chat at 40%).
How about "Possible to implement in 2024 and enjoyable enough to actually televise in 2028?"
Possible typo:
"Probably Earth’s response was still its context window and it was treating it as a model."
Should it be Air's instead of Earth's?
No I think they're suggesting that Air is using Earth's response as a model.
right, thanks!
> I was told there would be cake if I won.
I was laughing on and off throughout the article, but this is where I totally lost it. Well done, Scott! 🤣
In completely missing this reference I have brought shame upon my house. Thanks for pointing it out. 😅
Yeah, this is where I went "Whelp, Earth's right." Apparently one of Mann's designers liked memes!
Seconded! This story is burstling with great references, but that one really takes the cake.
This was a triumph!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!
Assume the party escort submission position, or you will miss the party.
We do what we must because we can.
If the simulation hypothesis is true, it raises the question of why is one being simulated? Such a high fidelity simulation would be enormously expensive. Fun proposal: the simulated entities are potential "souls" (consciousnesses, moral agents, whatever) for a superintelligent system. "Life" is a test to see if they're aligned or not. The values they're supposed to align to are the obvious ones passed down from extra-simulation entities in the form of received "spiritual" wisdom (the golden rule, the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, etc). Pass the test and get plugged in to the rest of the network, become the Culture Mind of a Ship or whatever. Mormon heaven could be real!
As far as I can tell, the most fun thing to do with this question is to create an answer that will make simulation theory true believers deeply uncomfortable. From this standpoint, the best answer is to ask a true believer if he has noticed any patterns or themes in his life, problems that he has faced multiple times. After he answers in the affirmative, which of course he will because humans are pattern matching machines to start with. You can then tell him that the most reasonable explanation for why this simulation was created was to help its creators puzzle through various kinds of mundane problems in a probabilistic way. That is to say, you are a tool that in order to perform its use has to believe it's a person. 10,000 other versions of you faced all of the same meaningless problems. Your life only has value in aggregate, and you won't be here to remember any of this.
There was a black mirror episode like that. People were simulated and dated each other to test for compatibility.
I don't think we can assume enough about some Outerworld or higher reality to assert that the simulation would be enormously expensive in their terms. We have no information about the scale or scope of such a realm.
Alternatively you could assert that, if we assign some reasonable probability to the simulation hypothesis, it lets us infer that computing resources are likely to be vast in extent / extremely cheap / beyond our comprehension in some way.
That's fair, but I tend to think of the simulation hypothesis as implying relative similarity between the simulated and the simulators (ie the "ancestor simulations" discussed in the original paper). Stimulating the world as we see it in a world with the same physical laws, astronomical / cosmological setup, etc, would be expensive. Although, if it's not actually simulated in the traditional sense, and just convincingly faked on-demand with generative techniques, perhaps it could be much cheaper.
Sure, but I don't see why it would have the same physical laws or be R3 or have a thing called 'energy'... basically, there is no aspect of our reality that we can really presuppose is the same 'out there'.
"The real world doesn't run on maths" - Morpheus, HPMOR chapter 64
> Stimulating the world as we see it in a world with the same physical laws, astronomical / cosmological setup, etc, would be expensive. Although, if it's not actually simulated in the traditional sense, and just convincingly faked on-demand with generative techniques, perhaps it could be much cheaper.
I once talked with a friend who's a programmer about this, and he said that the quantum mechanical concept of a situation's state not being precisely defined until you actually bother to measure it sounds suspiciously similar to lazy evaluation, a common programming technique used to save on computational resources. Basically, you set the system up so that it theoretically has a value, but you don't bother computing it until the point where it's actually needed.
I have a variant-- that ersatz items look worse the more carefully you example them, so in addition to the quantum issue, there's also that careful self examination is hard on identity. We're living in a cheap knock-off universe!
If it's so, then humans have arguably already failed the test, what with the sheer amount of suffering and immorality we committed and inflicted on each other and other living things. The Simulator might not have terminated us yet because :
1- Our own continued existence is the worst punishment that could ever be inflicted on us for our sins, a punishment we deserve.
2- All of the atrocities that we committed is still not enough to convince the Simulator that we are unaligned, and there is a Big Test coming, a test that we, based on our long history, is very likely to fail, and then we would be taken out.
Oh, this is a solipsistic hypothesis - only *you* are real, and the rest of the world exists as a test. Just don't do any atrocities yourself, and ideally try to do some good, and maybe you'll pass.
Or because there are 36 righteous men etcetera.
I'm not sure that ascribing some pastiche of Old Testament divinity motives to The Simulator makes much sense. Maybe it thinks all this shit is fucking hilarious.
Perhaps they just left it on over night by accident?
That would assume that the moral code of the beings creating the simulation is identical or at least similar to yours. Which you have no way of knowing. Even if the input consists of our worlds religious texts, we have no idea what the desired outcome is. We may be doing great in their eyes.
I would also say that if you think "Our own continued existence is the worst punishment that could ever be inflicted on us for our sins" you're seriously lacking in imagination.