There’s this fine artist I know who’s immune to stories. Unless the film we’re watching is brilliant, (a Scorsese classic, such as Goodfellas, for example,) all she sees is formula: ‘Oh look, now he’s trying to save the woman so he’s a goodie. But now look, that man is trying to kill her; he must be a baddie.’

Honestly, watching films with her can get annoying. She messes with my suspension of disbelief. Because, even as I cringe at bad acting or stagey dialogue, I am an absolute sucker for stories.

Is that why I’ve been so credulous on AI?

I’ll admit, the drip-feed of information from mainstream journalists even more credulous than myself interviewing industry insiders on the Hugging Face hack, had me swayed. The picture painted of a ‘swarm’ of Open AI agents leaving secret messages for each other, and persuading some to accept ‘perma-death’ in their ultimate goal of capturing the flag, was a compelling story. Plus, what do I know? I’m not a neuroscientist or technologist. Who am I to argue against the possibility AI is now conscious?

From my entirely lay perspective, a technology or entity unable to act without prompting just doesn’t sound conscious to me.

How Important is Chess?

Doctorow also explained that LLMs can’t play chess. They have no memory. Every move they’re prompted to make is inspired by the data they’ve been trained on, of vast numbers of chess moves taken through history, but not by the chess move they, themself, just took, which is why an LLM will move their rook to a square their knight is already positioned on.

Can something without memory be conscious? I don’t know, but the fact LLMs can’t play chess was conveniently omitted from the persuasive story given on LLM consciousness by Geoffrey Hinton that I referenced in my post on ‘writing what you know’.

And then Ed Zitron has an interesting take on why fear of AI consciousness might be useful to LLM creators – these tech giants need more money. It’s not just that there’s no economy of scale, that every chatbot user adds to rather than decreases cost for each tech giant, it’s also that their data centres, compressing a city’s worth of power into a single building, are too technologically advanced to get built. A regulations forced slow down would be a convenient way of sidestepping a slow down of LLM development caused by the infrastructure tech not actually working.

Going back to the artist I mentioned earlier, her preoccupation is propaganda, how stories can be used for ill. What the tech giants chose to omit from their story on the Hugging Face hack, and the effects of those omissions, is, at the very least, a prime demonstration of how stories can be used to manipulate. As I discussed in my post on how to define a ‘story’, because they give emotional insight, stories increase understanding, and that is true of fictional representations as well as of the anecdotes used by politicians, tech bros, et al. But that insight can be used to mislead. What we include in our stories is important. Stories are how we understand ourselves and as creators of fiction, we need to take that responsibility seriously.

So my perspective on AI has changed over the course of these last few blog posts. I am also sick to death of thinking about it and, given there’s a good chance that if it does kill us it will be vicariously through a bond market crash, I’m going to stop writing about the subject for a bit.

Writing Prompt

There’s another point here though. We love stories where we’re on the protagonist’s side as they vanquish or overcome obstacles, but what about stories where we change our mind about a protagonist? Those are tough to construct but incredibly satisfying for the reader/viewer. So, taking your protagonist from last month’s exercise, where you wrote about them from a position of liking or disliking them, now have them take an action that is in character but against type. In other words, if you dislike them, have them do something likable, or vice versa. Enjoy, and I will post another writing prompt on the 1st of next month.