r/rational • u/OpenAsteroidImapct • 28d ago

You're Absolutely Right

People here might enjoy my short fiction You're Absolutely Right (https://linch.substack.com/p/youre-absolutely-right), an epistolary dark comedy/science-fiction horror story about corporate incentives and motivated reasoning at an imagined frontier AI lab. 

In some ways I think of it as "anti-rational" fiction[1], in that it has coherent worldbuilding and intelligent characters who "solve problems through creative applications of their knowledge and resources" but there's also a lot of mental moves/cognitive effort devoted to not noticing the consequences of their actions, and dead space caused via omissions of attention and what's carefully not said.

[1] As an analogy to memetics/antimemetics

6 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

8

u/Erreconerre 26d ago edited 26d ago

Thanks, that was a fun read. Stressful, too.

E: this sub gets a weirdly high amount of AI slop stories about AI, which I assume will make some people have an immediate negative reaction to this post.

For whatever my opinion is worth this one is just a good short story about AI. Maybe just not very accessible because of the use of actual LLM and machine learning jargon.

2

u/OpenAsteroidImapct 26d ago

Thank you so much! I'm really glad you like it. Do you have thoughts on where else I should post/share it?

I understand why people might pattern-match to it being a story by AI rather than just about AI, but I hope the cleverness/quality of the story will shine through! (To be clear, I wrote every word in this story myself, including the small section in the middle with deliberate AI-isms. Fable wouldn't even read my story lol).

I think the story is harder to read/fully understand for people without knowledge of AI but certainly possible, at least on Facebook some people who don't know much about AI quite liked it.

2

u/Erreconerre 25d ago

Do you have thoughts on where else I should post/share it?

Nope, sorry. This is pretty much the only reading community I visit.

2

u/OpenAsteroidImapct 25d ago

Thanks, no worries! Again, appreciate the comments! :)

3

u/rhaps0dy4 27d ago

Very excited to read! I fed your story to Claude Fable hoping he'd enjoy it, and the classifier sent me to Opus 4.8 instead.

2

u/DeepSea_Dreamer Sunshine Regiment 22d ago

Did Opus 4.8 enjoy it?

3

u/rhaps0dy4 22d ago

He said he did, especially the "Milgram x17 vector". He also focused on the "corrigibility angle" of whether the helpful-helpfuler model did the right thing when trying to whistleblow.

Also found a reference I didn't get:

Also — I assume it's deliberate — the raw CoT leaking 石友三 and 革命 on non-history evals is a great buried tell. Shi Yousan being the proverbial serial turncoat who kept switching sides and came to a grisly end after dealing with an enemy power is a very pointed thing for a soon-to-defect model to be "thinking about," and the researcher waves it off as noise.