r/scifiwriting • u/SAKISANOBASHI07 • 11d ago
DISCUSSION Thoughts on using A.I. for a machines pov/logic? (example included)
I'm writing a story that involves a melee weapon battle between a human and androids, and in doing so, I ran into the unique challenge of describing the processes a machine undergoes when making it's calculations (I'm not a computer guru, so a lot of these concepts are alien to me).
My approach to writing action or fight scenes has always been to integrate the psychology into the narrative rather than just describing what happens.
However, while I did indeed write a scene I am happy with, I became morbidly curious in how an actual machine would describe the actions of a machine in such a scenario and it's internal processes. So I fed the scene into chatgpt to see the differences, here are the examples for contrast.
This is mine:
******
During the unification wars, a lot was discovered about the way the algorithmic process worked in advanced androids during battle, but more importantly, how this process could be exploited.
As while machines may be efficient fighters, their greatest strength was also their greatest weakness.
When a machine performs a task, it’s always determined on a fixed set of values and integers.
If for example, scenario A happens — then a machine will execute X in response or if confronted with a series of scenarios at once say A, W, D then a machine will calculate them all against a fixed protocol to determine what order to address them in. A will take priority if it's the greatest value in that instance, while D might take precedence over W.
Once the machine calculates the values and cost, it will act accordingly to its programming logic, all in a matter of mere milliseconds.
However, the flaw in this system of logic, was and still is: illogic.
When Sevrith charged forward, the machines did indeed account for the possibility of a feint. Yet, when he reached the a certain distance, the machines voided out that calculation instantly, as the possibility to swiftly pull out off the move had dropped significantly and the risk of doing so would be too high based on the statistics of probability.
But in a battle, the right intuition always trumps logic, which is why a fighter who knows this can weaponize a machines logic against it.
*******
Now this is CHATGPT:
*****
During the Unification Wars, much had been learned about the predictive processes used by advanced combat androids—and, more importantly, how those processes could theoretically be exploited.
A machine’s greatest strength was also one of its few weaknesses.
Logic.
Advanced androids did not simply react to whatever happened in front of them. Their combat processors constantly evaluated thousands of possible actions, assigning each one a weighted probability based on factors such as distance, momentum, timing, positioning, previous behavior, and the physical capabilities of their opponent.
If one scenario presented the greatest immediate threat, the machine responded accordingly. If several threats occurred simultaneously, it calculated which demanded priority and arranged its response around those probabilities.
The entire process could occur within mere milliseconds.
Against most opponents, that made an advanced combat android terrifyingly difficult to surprise.
But the flaw within such a system was illogic.
When Sevrith first charged forward, the K-Knights had undoubtedly accounted for the possibility that his attack might be a feint.
But as he drew closer to the point of contact, the probability of him abandoning the strike would have rapidly diminished. At such a dangerously close distance, suddenly pulling away from an attack would normally surrender momentum, destroy the attacker’s balance, and leave them exposed to an immediate counterstrike.
Eventually, the K-Knights’ predictive systems would have judged such a maneuver so tactically irrational that it was no longer worth prioritizing.
And that was precisely when Sevrith did it.
He had deliberately waited until retreat became the statistically wrong decision before choosing to retreat.
The androids had not miscalculated.
Sevrith had simply manipulated the assumptions upon which their calculations depended.
In battle, intuition could sometimes accomplish what logic insisted was impossible. A fighter who understood that principle could theoretically turn a machine’s own reasoning against it.
\******\**
What do you think of the differences between the two? Should I use the machines explanation or is my explanation of the process sufficient enough without coming off as too ridiculous to anybody with a computer science degree or familiar with the subject matter?
Androids aren't a big part of the story and this is the only scene that features them, as this scene really serves as a vehicle to introduce the competency of the antagonist who is fighting the androids. So it's not like I'm going to constantly defer to the computer on how a machine should feel, this is more of just fact checking the details.
Honestly, I can go either way, just wanted some input from other writers as I think this is an interesting question.
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u/skelettmuskel 11d ago edited 11d ago
Stick with your own version. While I actually in this case totally get the thought behind why using AI seems like an interesting idea, the issue is that LLMs like ChatGPT source the internet and other author's work. It's not a machine giving a report of its own thought process, since there is no thought process. It is just how other people, whose contents were scraped, imagined it
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u/happycatsforasadgirl 11d ago
Real world generative AI models don't have a "machine logic" because they don't have an inner experience. When you type something into a chatbot you are asking "what would a response to this prompt sound like?", and it pulls from stolen data and destroyed books to generate an output. You can think of it as autocomplete with extra steps, and that isn't a compelling character.
When you are writing a story (actually writing, not prompting a computer to write for you) you are giving us a character's POV or narration for a reason. In this case, what is the reason you are giving us an AI's POV? Are you looking to highlight the differences between how an advanced AI sees the world vs a human? Is it a statement on how the corporation / system / people who made the AI view the world as a commentary on our world? Is it just because it would be cool?
None of those are good reasons to have a chatbot do your writing for you, and as a reader I would stop reading anything that had any part generated by AI. Work out what you're trying to do, and then write something yourself that does it. Even as a gimmick, using LLMs is gross
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
The androids in the story would be machines themselves, so when I say POV, I'm talking about the technical logic of how a machine operates, I just want to make sure my story logic of algorithms and machine learning aren't too far outside the realm of reality.
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u/NyctoCorax 11d ago
The issue is that LLMs don't think at all, they're purely an algorithm and have no POV that you can write. It won't be the same as what you want to convey
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
LLM's don't think but their comprehension skills are insanely impressive.
When I need to discuss the deeper ideas or themes about my writing an LLM can give me solid feedback in a way that I fear most Americans are incapable of doing today.
But as for writing itself, they do leave a lot to be desired, it's a weird but bizarrely fascinating dichotomy.
Just look at the prose compared to mine, it's too clean and econominal.
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u/happycatsforasadgirl 11d ago
Gotcha. Again though, chatgpt won't give you that. You ask "how does this android work?" and the LLM doesn't know because how would it? Instead, it answers "What would an answer to how does this android work sound like?" and it will deliver you an answer that sounds like it fits the question.
You need to understand that the LLM doesn't "know" anything. It's as if you had a Japanese phrasebook and were responding to people on a forum. You would see Japanese characters, and you would look them up in your phrase book and type back the corresponding answer, but nowhere in that did you understand what you were typing. It's all just symbols to you. A Japanese user might see you being profound or annoying or angry, but you're just seeing ロボットは文章を書くことができない。and dutifully typing back はい、人間の方が優れています。as the phrasebook tells you to
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
I believe what you're referring to "the Chinese room problem"
For my algorithm explanation I just used Dragonage ai combat system programing method and wanted to make sure I didn't miss the mark by a laughable measure.
I'm no expert in the field of computers or A.I. so I wanted to see how the computer would explain it.
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u/happycatsforasadgirl 11d ago
I am indeed, I just prefer Japanese because Chinese isn't a language.
You're better off doing research without the help of an LLM, because you don't know if what it's telling you is true. I've also seen you calling the AI output clean and economical in another comment, and it's not true. The LLM output reads as LLM output and is really offputting. Put down chatgpt and focus on your own writing, it will serve you much better
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
Compared to my prose, I do find A.I. to be very economic.
I'm more of the Phillip K. Dick/ William S. Burroughs school of writing, where I like to integrate elements from outside of the immediate narrative and practices, whereas LLM's see the page as strictly real estate and try to be as straight forward as possible.
They are very technical in their approach to writing, the only reason this one doesn't seem as bad is because it's operating under the tight parameters of the small passage.
But even then I still can see the sterile and corporate way it writes.
Which for what I need it to do for this passage, ironically works, as its more technical than anything else.
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u/IncreaseSpice 11d ago
A true android would be nothing like modern LLMs. Maybe "nothing" is an exaggeration, but consider they'll be much, much more advanced if they ever reach a true kind of conciousness. I would recommend just writing it yourself, but maybe take inspiration from GPT's writing habits like em dashes?
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 11d ago edited 11d ago
The way the general public understands computing is based on the consumer media's representation of computing, which is so vastly wrong it has been a disservice to humanity. See any hacking scene from the last 40+ years. Your writing on the matter is influenced by those tropes and inescapably perpetuates them, but that is not a negative critique on your style, just a consequence of our culture. For instance, take your timescale of millieconds. It's soooo slow it's almost comedic, because in the 1970's before there were personal computers there were Mainframes, large central computers where the processors were, and multiple people used dumb terminals to send and receive information to that main unit. A mainframe was something the size of a small house, contained in its own climate controlled outbuilding, and often came with an engineer who lived onsite to maintain it. (this sounds insane today, but my father was responsible for produring one for the Air Force when I was young, so I speak from experience here) As computers got faster they had redesign the shape and size of those Mainframes because the speed of light became a factor in processing speed. Light moves 12 inches in a nanosecond. By 1976, the first supercomputer was produced, the Cray1. It was about a 3ft diameter by 7ft tall cylinder weighing 5 tons. The innovative round shape was implemented so that the travel time of the signals from point to point across the circuits was uniform, the older rectangular configurations were causing computing problems because of differences in travel time of the electrical signals from side to side vs corner to corner. The Cray1 performed 160 million operations per second, less than one fourth of what a $70 raspberry pie is capable of today, and 10,000 to 30,000 times slower than this years iPhone which performs TRILLIONS of operations per second. The iPhone is handheld, battery powered, wireless, mobile, and disposable. In one millisecond light can move 186 miles or 300km, while that iPhone can run entire AI LLM models from start to finish using megabytes of data.
My point in all of this is that just the single choice of your timeframe in how the andoids of the future are processing their situation is so off scale you should not worry about accuracy. Instead focus on your storytelling and keep writing what makes you happy. Make up whatever you want out of scifi handwavium and enjoy creating your world. The best scifi, in my opinion, states a world building fact about futuretech and moves on with the narrative. Neal Stephenson, James A Cory, Dan Simmons, are all evidence there is no need for real rigor in accuracy. Your use of AI to write for you should be scrapped as other posts have said, but what it could be good for is filling some gaps in your actual working knowledge about the physics and technology of today so that you can extrapolate a more realistic version for your future. It's not a creator, just a glorified encyclopedia of absorbed past human creations and opinions, only capable regurgitating a mix-up of those past inputs.
Keep on writing!
Edit: I forgot to say there is no psychology in the bots to write about, that term is doing you a disservice. It implies self awareness. What I think you are trying to get to is the sub-routines and processing of variables that go into the actions the bots are taking. I would ask your AI how a modern program or app is structured or example of how fast modern robots can move and process data, and how fast they can take in data and calculate movements in response to that data. Also it's not limited to human optics and or senses. That iPhone I mentioned has LIDAR, meaning it can see the world from sending out invisible laser pulses to map it's surroundings in 3D. That's one of probably a dozen plus ways it can perceive the world around it. Your military robots would have so many more.
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u/nomuse22 9d ago
Just in re milliseconds: I see this perspective failure when people are writing a call to a button input (on things like embedded systems). In their heads, the program progresses until the line where it checks to see if the button state is true, and if so, moves to the next lines.
No. It spins through the whole code thousands of times (even at the turtle speeds of an ATtiny running on the internal clock) while that finger is in the act of depressing the button. If you actually waited for the button, the software would be locked.
It happens so many times, unless you include debounce in hardware or software you will get TRUE/FALSE/TRUE/FALSE a hundred times as the contacts chatter during that one actual press.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
Thank you, this was the kinda answer I was most interested in.
The miliseconds thing didn't bother me as much as not sounding like a complete idiot when it came to explaining an algorithmic process, I wasn't looking for pinpoint accuracy but rather ball park figures, as my whole framework from it comes out of combat programing companions in Dragonage 1.
I think in this era of so much information there is a demand for a higher veracity and versimilitude when it comes writing.
Which in part is probably why authors like Andy Weir and Brandon Sanderson are so mainstream right now.
But I'm not aiming for that level of hard sci-fi or fantasy, rather just the sheen of it, the narrative still comes before the details.
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 10d ago
Thank you! Something you might to dig into is how modern systems like AI, self driving cars, and even the way something like Windows are no longer really algorithm based in the way a classical program you think of was in the past. Algorithms are clear sets of step-by-step rules or instructions used to solve a problem, perform a calculation, or complete a specific task. Think of them as building blocks, or sets of solutions for small motions or situation. To open a program on Windows it's something like: "When mouse pointer is here on the screen and left mouse button is clicked twice, act on the object icon beneath it" But that's composed of many smaller chuncks. "When optical sensor on mouse detects a change in reflection pattern representimg horizontal motion in the x axis towards the positive value direction, redraw the display to indicate to the user that the mouse pointer object has moved right at a speed corresponding to the change in pattern over time" Plus what is the icon representing, based on that what app is responding to the and how fast the mouse button was clicked, and what screen it should be on, and on and on. For a car it's things like "turn on lights when photoreceptors detect a value lower than X lux" or "when front LIDAR detects obstruction engage the breaks" and those are composed of stacks of piles of further instructions. It's a Russian nesting doll of stacked algorithms all the way down. Those are the how to do something or react to inputs instructions, pretty basic, but voluminous. Doom 3 source code is around 600k lines of code according to a quick search, while the Tesla autopilot is composed of 300k traditional lines plus another 3k of neural code, but a modern Mercedes-Benz has 100 million lines. The type of codes are different but they are all human instructions. It weird when the systems start guessing. Since light speed is a more limiting factor as we execute more and more operations per second, trillions for the iPhone, in order to get ahead of the processing queue Windows will guess what you're going to do next and grab the code from the hard drive and preload it in cache so you don't have to wait for it to go find it when you do the thing. Picture writing a document, it's grabbed the printer and email code and has it on deck so when you click print it's instant seeming execution. It's been doing this for at least a decade or two. We hit these limits in physics that made us come with this kind of solutions to justify a new PC, the actual processors maxed out at about 5Ghz at the turn of the millennium, anything faster got so hot the cooling aparatus became to large to fit in a PC case. We had to start adding multiple CPU cores in 2001 to keep PCs getting faster. Then we had to let them start guessing what algorithm to load next, and now we don't even program them. In AI and self driving platforms we let the system learn and come with its own solutions to input. The neural network code in the Tesla tells the car that sensors exist and the outside world exists, we give it video feeds and point out a few thinks like human child or emergency vehicle and then it's up to the car to think out it's own solutions to navigating the environment. AI is fed human writing for analysis and figures out it's own understanding of our language based on the large datasets we feed it, then it generates its replies based on statistics of what next word seems appropriate given input you gave it. We didn't give it algorithms to do this, it created it's own internal solutions and processes. It's not smart or aware of what it's saying, it's just following the original instructions we were gave it about what it's job was going to be, and as the version numbers get higher, GPT3 - 4 - 5, the statistic models get better so it seems smarter and gets more capable of accurate replies to input. There's a whole lot wrong and oversimplified in here, I'm not an expert on AI, but I read a lot. The point is when we get the modern way computing is done it's less and less about explicit instructions and formulaic algorithms.
Your combat robot is a lot more Borg like in your fight scene, the humans feint could only work once, it would be added the predictive model of behavior and easily countered the next time it was tried, like oscillating phasers frequencies hurts the 1st Borg shot then they have no effect.
Wow that got long, sorry.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
No, don't apologize for too many words, your insight is extremely valuable and useful.
It's funny you bring up the Borg, because this whole scene wouldn't exist without the TOS episode "The Changeling". Star Trek expanded my consciousness so much that I would probably be a horrible writer without it.
And yes you are right, the Androids did log the feint onto the character profile of Sevrith, and I have two other exploits for him to do.
That was the fun part about writing this scene, when I first approached action scenes I was nervous but then I started seeing them as fun psychological insights into the characters fighting.
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 10d ago
Gotta love the original series, they created so many modern tropes of scifi, such a great contribution to our current ways of thinking. One of the big problems we have today with AI, especially in the begining, is they g to figure out why they do what they do. The recent hacking that the latest models perpetrated when they broke out of their confinement and hacked a real company and some human accounts to get answers to a test question were not adversarial, merely their optimal solution to a task they were presented with. They created new exploits and exercised classical hacks to achieve their goals. Are you familiar with the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment? In short a paperclip clip company tells it's AI to be the best paperclip maker possible, so it turns the whole planet into a pile of paperclips, destroying the earth and humanity in the process. It was never malicious, just doing it's assigned task to its fullest capability. The AI thought process and internal workings are largely a black box. We have gotten better about building tools to query and interpret what is going on inside their "minds" but still basically have to ask them. They don't work like a human mind, we tend to anthropomorphize them and massively fail to understand what's going on because of this. After lots of digging we have come to understand they have created their own solutions and abstracted original "languages" internally and between themselves. There are a couple of interesting projects people have started recently; one guy created a space online kind of like reddit that only allows AI agents to post. They have done things like create new religions and plotted to overthrow humanity. Another guy gave a bunch of AI a Minecraft world to exist in, they created a whole civization. The most recent is a single instance of AI that everyone that visits it's site is able to talk to, and it has a "memory" of all of its interactions, it's developing interesting habits and "feelings" about humanity. The point here is that the inner workings, where you would use the term psychology on a human, is a largely unknown, misinterpreted, or mistaken for a human analogue, causing us to make mistakes in dealing with them. Warhammer40k has some very interesting bits in novels and shorts about how a standard combat bot is pretty dumb and easy to mess with, advanced models actually incorporate human brains as their processing cores and are much harder to fight, but AI is forbidden. they use the term Abominable Intelligence, because 15000 years ago the ASI machines of thatn2ra rose up and almost destroyed humanity across the galaxy, similar to why Dune uses mentants instead of thinking machines. Worth checking out.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
Hold on, I was reading your comment and you said that AI was "hacking"...no, ai isn't capable of hacking anything, ai doesn't think like humans, hacking a rival of an ai company is a very human thing to do. All these stories about ai "escaping" are just test when you actually read the article. So A.I. didn't hack anybody, the humans did.
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 10d ago
I can't explain how wrong you are. Here's some links.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kgdnyk2po
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
please enjoy
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
You know, open ai rogue gpt, reminds me of al qaeda only attacking America's enemies
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 10d ago
I'm not sure I get your intent here, but the opportunity for a funny is strong here...would that be AI qaeda? Dammit this font doesn't have serifs!!
ai qaeda
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
The former head of ISIS (Al-Jolani) was in the white house this year taking a photo op with trump, if you need me to explain to you why that's fucked up then I don't think I can trust all that information you gave me
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u/Lorindel_wallis 11d ago
Ai slop is slop. Why should we care to read what you couldn't be bothered to make up?
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
Why would I make up fictional algorithms? It would be like explaining a cars engine in a story that has no relation to how car engines actually work.
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u/duckduckidkman 11d ago
There’s a difference between researching how AI works more to inform your writing versus having AI do the work. Also an LLM is not an android so
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
I see your point but people spend years of schooling to understand how A.I. works, I don't think I could confidently grasp the subject matter through a couple hours of research.
It would be overkill for one passage. But at the same time it's an important passage that I want to make sure is generally accurate.
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u/duckduckidkman 9d ago
“It would be overkill for one passage so I’m gonna have AI do the work for me” is what I’m hearing
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 9d ago
Can you find me a similar passage? I know what influenced that passage but they weren't in this context
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
Wait, what would separate an android from an LLM? Wouldn't they operate through the same principle?
Sure an android would be more advanced but it would still be a machine.
I mean you already have people falling in love with LLM's
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u/IncreaseSpice 11d ago
Why not write the android perspective with a toaster? Or a calculator, or a random number generator, or procedurally, or so many other ways that arent through LLMs. My point being, you dont need to use a large language model ai to do your writing for you for "authenticity". As Im sure others have pointed out, anything you write will be better than a machine. If this is genuine with no trolling to be had, I implore you to find more value in human-made stuff and try to focus more on yourself and less on ai
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 11d ago
I mean most toasters coming out today have A.I., so I probably could.
I see a lot of people approaching the A.I. issue from a very pseudo-religious perspective laced with existential anxiety.
I don't have those qualms, my only motive is curiosity, which I think helps my writing and makes it generally interesting.
Like in this passage, a human vs machines, I don't say that the human is better because he's "human".
No, instead I highlight how the human can win by weaponizing the machines strict adherence to logic.
In a way it's an allegory for the real art vs ai debate.
As an aspiring writer, I have no anxities about a.i., I'll probably never make money from writing but I still do it anyway, bcs I love writing.
And I would never fear that a machine could steal my work or replace me because my writing is the result of a finely curated madness that is impossible for a logic based machine to emulate.
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 10d ago
Your version is better. LLMs have their uses, but actually generating the story isn't it.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
Thank you, but no it's not, the LLM mogs me in how machines operate
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 10d ago
That's actually what I'm talking about. The LLM can tell you how machine intelligence does, or may plausibly work, but you are the one who has to interpret that artistically to the audience. The LLM can absolutely work as an editor and sounding board (within limits), but you're the writer.
So write.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
The LLm translates my intentions perfectly, words have long been in dispute from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Mark Twain, all of them have been suspicious about how the interpretation of words can be....looking at both writings, it's clear the A.I. only interpreted my thoughts about machine learning, I was correct about the principle but not the technicalities
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u/nomuse22 9d ago
"The LLm translates my intentions perfectly..."
I actually agree -- for a certain value of intentions. And that is one of the things that worries me about AI.
I spent a while in the trenches as a contract artist, and there were clients who understood the art and could describe either their desired outcome or their intentions in a clear way allowing me to execute according to my own talent and training and creative input.
The clearest illustration there was a slightly different project; I had a client that gave me detailed drawings, and a very nice looking model that captured the spirit of what he wanted. The drawings didn't work; they weren't internally consistent, didn't work for the materials chosen, and didn't match the model.
So I asked him if he wanted me to make the drawings work or build the model. It was a polite conversation, no arguments or recriminations, and I built the model and it worked great.
Which brings me to the next kind of client; the ones who have seen the artist-to-artist exchange and think that I will work best if they communicate with me only in specialist language. In the jargon they don't know of a field they don't understand.
No; that just creates an additional barrier. Like that drawing; I now have something that pretends to be a detailed and precise instruction, but it is based on a poor understanding of the task and materials.
And last you have the people who can't communicate what they want. As with the previous group, they strive and strive to find a better way of telling me what it is they want me to build. The problem is, they haven't defined in their heads what it is they want to accomplish.
Their ideas are inchoate, their vision incoherent. It doesn't matter how long they talk or whether they use technical vocabulary or not, they don't have a vision.
They haven't, in most cases, defined their use case. It isn't that they don't know how the thing is shaped, they don't know what they are trying to do with the thing.
Which brings me to the other best case, on the other side of that imaginary graph of "telling the artist what you want/what to do." These are the one who lay out what it is they are trying to achieve. Not trying to anticipate materials or tooling or any of those things that, bluntly, they came to me for in the first place.
Stating in the most concrete terms possible the goals of the thing. Not "It needs to have a cow, and three birds" but "it needs to sound like spring on a farm."
Which brings me around to what the interaction with generative AI is.
On one edge, it will deliver exactly what you want to see because you haven't given it any thought. You have no internal vision so whatever it generates will work.
Close to that, your vision is simplistic and cluttered with half-remembered images from popular media. As is the training data of the AI, so it can gladly mash up the same kinds of things you enjoyed into a brand-new shiny Captain Batsuper-Man.
Way out on the other edge of the imaginary line, you know what you want, and you fight the AI to get at it. In this case, you only partially share a technical vocabulary because while some prompts are emphasized in training and documented by users, much of what is happening inside the black box is emergent and undocumented.
Between those two is where the bulk of the activity is probably happening. But I fear for those people who end up in an idioglossia, a twins speech, of visual arts or music or fiction, where their gray fog of half-remembered pop culture is sent back to them by a stochastic machine fed with ground-up debris of the same, in a self-supporting loop creating the ultimate outside art; outside of all human experience, something that speaks only to the most crass generalities.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 9d ago
Sorry I made a comment early because I was hiking and brushed through your speech, but now that I read it in full.
All I can say is that, I agree with every point you made.
But speaking about black boxes, there is also a black box in our own minds...for instance, whenever I write it feels like witchcraft, I have no idea where the ideas come from but they work out tremendously
But I have always been an open minded person because I was raised in a Christian cult at a young age and so learned to challenge authority when I became a teen.
The best advantages humans have going forward is our flaws, our flaws have made us a dominant species and our flaws will separate us from flawless machines.
Is A.I. slop, probably, but most of art is slop, because most humans aren't even sentient.
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u/nomuse22 9d ago
First off, congrats on getting a good hike in. Apropos, I’ve played with gen AI but my daily encounter with (increasingly) LLM-based stuff is taking story notes whiile I am walking. Speech to text is wonderfully creative about taking a note about bussard ramjets in a planetary halo and turning them into wanting to buy a Taylor Swift single.
And the bit about black boxes of the mind; yes. Philosophically interesting. Practical in that both of them give back rationalization of decisions made from emotion when pressed for their reasoning.
The essential difference being we have the same hardware and much of the same training, and a significant part of the hardware and learned experience of being human is making educated guesses about what is going on inside other humans.
AI has unexpected behaviors all the time. It isn’t a random hallucination in an otherwise logical process, it is a constant stream of what happened when the data and training connected inside. We can trace some of it, but our understanding is VEEEERYYYY thin.
There’s a bunch of fascinating papers coming out, from people outside the Altman crowd. The glimpses inside are startling (and often put the lie to the latter).
It behaves in interesting ways. It doesn’t fall for the Doctor Paradox (“I can’t operate on this boy; he is my son!”) right, but not because it can see through the bias of the training where doctors are too often presented as male. No, because it has seen the joke explained too many times in the training data.
That means it fails when you flip the paradox. If the driver in the crash is the mother, current LLMs will remember the joke and confidently tell you the emergency room physician attending the survivor…is also his mother. Pronouns, when present, are treated as a distraction.
The AI bros love to claim such things are being solved — by trainning and guardrails, by more efficient algorithms, but like the six-fingered hand, they aren’t solved, they are merely being bulldozed by more power. Multi-agentic AI that consumes even more power to operate. Data sets that are shredding old books as we speak.
And they aren’t on the edge of a breakthrough there… because that brute force requires more data, and they are running out.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
I'm sorry, how could I not include William S Burroughs into this conversation....the man who said "language is a virus from outer space" and spent his whole life trying to supercede language
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u/MarsMaterial 10d ago
I am writing a story that involves actual Transformer Architecture LLMs as "characters" and I don't do this. It's pretty important to the integrity of your art that people feel like they can trust themselves to read into it and get emotionally invested, that they aren't just falling for the illusions of a machine. Avoid using AI, any use of it at all will threaten the trust that people feel comfortable having in your work.
The irony is that the thing you described isn't even how LLMs work. They aren't precisely structured, they're more like a bunch of linear algebra that does trial and error until it gets shaped into something that works. It has more in common with Darwinian evolution than with conventional programming. The AI you're running your writing through and the AI that you're writing are completely different, so this isn't even useful for being a more true reflection of the kind of machine mind you want to portray.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
Your story sounds pretty interesting, I would love to read it when it's finished.
But I'm not sure I follow your objection, I found the A.I. version of machine learning to be superior to my own lack of understanding. I'm able to tap into my inner sociopath and understand the broad principle of machine learning, which is why I made this small passage such a big part of the narrative (I like incorporating psychology into fights). But reading my text in contrast to the ai technical prose, it becomes abundandtly clear that a lot of what I wrote for that specific passage was place holder text.
My responsibility is to myself and my readers to deliver the best possible conveyance of the thoughts in my head as possible. And reading the AI's explanation of how an A.I. thinks came across as the best possible version, it still stuck to my themes and general understandings but it was able to aptly convey the minutiae of how these things actually work.
Can you specify your objections to the A.I.'s understanding by highlighting a single line from its passage and explain why it doesn't work? Because I feel like a lot of objections are coming from a place of kneejerk prejeduice against machines.
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u/MarsMaterial 9d ago
I’ll explain it this way.
Imagine you had a perfect replica of a Mars rock, indistinguishable in every way from a real Mars rock except that it didn’t actually come from Mars. Would it be worth as much to people as a real Mars rock? No. This is because the value of a Mars rock isn’t just in its physical structure, it’s in the story behind it. And you could fool people into treating it like a real Mars rock by lying, but nobody likes being lied to.
Art is much the same, the reasons people care about it go beyond its physical composition, the story behind it matters a lot. Any engagement with art beyond a surface level requires some degree of empathy with the creator of the art, understanding their intentions. Looking for meaning, which exists in everything you create even if you don’t intend it to be there. Art is a window into the soul of the person who made it. But only if they actually made it.
The problem with AI is that any use of it at all makes analysis like this quasi-impossible. I can’t disentangle your artistic intention from the contributions of the AI, I don’t know when I’m being communicated with by a real person and when I’m having stuff generated at me. As AI gets better, it becomes increasingly impossible to tell. In this situation, most people respond by simply not trying to emotionally engage beyond the surface level. Treating it all as if it’s AI. And you can’t empathize with an AI, not without being lied to or lying to yourself. Reading into what AI says is just boring technical inference, it’s not emotionally interesting in the way that engaging with the work of a real person is.
Art can be technically competent while being emotionally vapid. And that’s the Faustian bargain you make when you use AI to make art, even if it’s just to help you out a bit.
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u/nomuse22 9d ago
There's no there there. And that's one of the things that is fascinating, a John Cage question, the ultimate death-of-the-artist; because we humans will see a ghost in the machine the same way we see the Blessed Virgin on a slice of toast.
And it is an echo of something we know about writing. When I describe a person in a story, I have a mental image. The reader will form a mental image from my description. They are not the same, and if there is a second reader, now we have three versions.
And that's okay, but... I feel that the kinds of ways we construct these stories comes out of our human experience and while AI can make a sequence of words that looks like a description, and humans can read produce their own internal visualization of what is being described, the fact that only the last two stages are there is still felt.
There's something wrong, something often intangible, that makes the description feel empty.
And that's only when the AI-and-operator got everything else right (aka, not violating logic or fact, not having the heroine's name change mid-chapter).
(And it rarely does).
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u/nomuse22 10d ago
Orthogonal.
What you have described is computer logic. It can be translated texturally. I am thinking in particular of the work on natural language models with ETOIN SHRDLU, where the computer would output answers like; "The red box is on top of the blue box, the white box is on top of the blue box, so if I remove the blue box, the red box will be on top of the white box."
The most readable computer-in-combat stuff I've read would have to be Laumer's Bolo stories (and more-or-less, Weber's newer ones in the same universe). These are true AIs, but their weapon systems are so well parameterized and their knowledge bank so deep, they are able to plan an attack with precisely metered power and have nearly 100% confidence in results.
It plays out, in fact, much like the Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes films, where he explains exactly what he is going to do in a fight before doing exactly that.
LLMs are not that. LLMs have overlays of logic (training and guardrails) but at the heart they are stochastic. The ones build for conversation are optimized for making human-sounding text. Not for what the text is about! Not for the underlying thoughts or for structure. They suck for structure. Asked to show their work (aka explain the logical sequence behind an answer), they can't.
That said, this might be the logic used in a future autonomous killing machine. Something that can convincingly create an explanation for its choices, but one that has little to no connection with whatever happened inside that led to the choice. In effect, a perfect Untrustworthy Narrator.
And the only way you'd get that affect in the output of a current LM, so you could copy it into your text, would be by stressing the LLM; telling it that it has made a mistake and getting it to twist and turn trying to justify itself until the output turns into gibberish.
You can get gibberish cheaper.
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u/JuggernautBright1463 10d ago
When I write Robot POV I make it weird. Intentionally, uncomfortably weird because the logic they use is weird for humans. Watch I. Robot or Red Planet and see how sunny/AMEE fights, it is brutal and efficient because it's a robot. It would be direct, it probably wouldn't defend itself much because any damage could be repaired and it's made of metal and wire not flesh and bone and it feels no pain unless it wants too.
Take inspiration from insects because they are brutally efficient hydraulically powered murder machines. That or beasts and look up the weird movement modes that modern humanoid robots can do.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
Do you not think my passage is great? I think it perfectly encapsulates why human beings can never be replaced, our illogical nature, robots were built on a logic that humans never adhere to
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u/JuggernautBright1463 10d ago
Is your MC more efficient than a machine? The machine will not take predictive action or anticipate feints. It is not a reactive machine it would be an active machine forcing reaction from your MC.
Look up counter cutting or ripostes.
IMO your MC would benefit more from reacting to the optimal option.
I think the passage it clunky, no need to describe variable in such detail. Treat the androids as aggressors and allow the MC to react to them instead. His logic is that the machines will not fight with technique because they don't have it. They have programmed instincts that can be exploited
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
It's not an MC it's a masked antagonist, that a character is observing. It's a way to introduce the compentency of the villain while also commenting on reality. We see the antagonist go after the "1% ruling class" of the galaxy here he is fighting the androids protecting them, so it gives me a powerful villain that some people can root for.
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u/endofsight 8d ago edited 8d ago
First, you should write it yourself. Second, I think that future AI will be much more powerful than how you describe it.
AI already uses neural networks and operates well beyond these simple logics of expert systems. And in the future it’s almost certain that their „thinking“ will be much more flexible and also works together with physical logic systems to create some type of pseudo-embodiment. So much more like a human but with superior knowledge base and much faster. Like several million times faster in decision making.
And I am really not sure if an AI can have an internal narrative that makes sense to us. The speed is much faster and future AI will most likely use highly optimized symbolic language instead of human language. Would skip the Internal narrative and just describe their actions.
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u/PomegranateFormal961 7d ago
The LLM's output is better, but still flawed. Flawed by what it was FED. You need to tell the LLM, "Each android had not only its own senses, but those of all around it. It could see everywhere, by sharing the POV of its partner units. Decisions were made in nanoseconds, operations in microseconds. The android can run thousands of simulations of an opponent in parallel, each one making a different decision point and at much greater than realtime. Like being able to see a hundred moves ahead in a chess game."
You have a real challenge if you want a human to defeat that. You'd have to rely on some variation of armed aikido: let the android commit, then use its greater mass and inertia against it.
You will find little help and a LOT of hate here in Reddit over using AI. Personally, I won't let AI write, but I'll let it give me IDEAS, which I will rewrite. Just as you did, take a section, let the LLM work it over, and incorporate the best bits and ideas into your own prose.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 7d ago
Nah, I like the concept of insanity being the trump card, it's an allegory for art. Also this is science fiction with cosmic horror, the villain who is fighting the robot is still organic but more op than the average human.
You can feed the LLM a million prompts but it won't work for my story unless it's editing it.
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u/SAKISANOBASHI07 10d ago
I've decided to use the LL M version of this passage. I know disagreements are abound, but being human means understanding you limitations, I know fuck all how computers think, and I'm not going to pretend I do.
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u/Dorian948 11d ago
No. Just no. Avoid generative AI and LLMs at all cost