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, that man’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?

But then the inimitable Cory Doctorow stepped in with another excellent interview he gave to Novara Media, in which he explained no LLM was acting alone in the hack. That a Python Programme, (whatever that is,) was hacking like it’s supposed to and every step of its journey giving the LLM prompts. The Python Programme and the LLM were in a loop without a human being, but the LLM was never acting unprompted.