Okay, since I criticised Sammy’s story I also have to put up or shut up.

A metafictional literary short story about AI and grief

Imagine someone commits a crime. Shouldn’t be too hard, that happens all the time. Let’s say it’s the kind of crime that the police will bother to investigate. The department has just bought a fancy new AI detective tool and they’re eager to try it. Maybe it’s a facial recognition program or perhaps some kind of apparatus for reconstructing the events of the scene. Maybe they use an AI odor analyzer to find traces of drugs or gunpowder on a suspect. If you’re really fanciful they might have an AI reconstruct a suspect’s personality and interrogate it for a confession.

Based on this evidence the police arrest one of your loved ones. Maybe some of you will find that too hard to believe? Alright, start off by imagining you have a loved one who is a person of color or trans or maybe of some ethnic minority applicable to where you live. If you can’t manage to imagine that, this story might just not be for you.

So your loved one gets arrested. They might get killed in the arrest, or if that’s too rough for this story, they just get their property seized. Maybe their pet is shot or the police plant contraband on them. They’re terrified, they’re humiliated, their reputation is destroyed. Maybe they’re given a plea bargain to confess or risk a longer sentence. They might miss work and get fired. Maybe the cost of the trial ruins them financially. Maybe they’re sentenced to prison or even death row. In any case, nothing good comes out of being arrested.

Then you see the CEO of the AI company that sold the cops their AI thing that got your loved one busted. Maybe they’re testifying in court or being interviewed on the news. They’re being flippant and confident. They’re saying this new model has an incredibly low hallucination rate and the chance of a false positive is almost nonexistent. Afterwards the CEO goes home and sleeps in peace. They will never bother to imagine what I just told you to.

I do appreciate that underneath the overwrought prose and terrible metaphors the AI-generated story seems deeply skeptical of it’s own existence in a way that the non-generative responses don’t. Like there’s something so fundamental about the disconnect between artificial intelligence and the genuine human experience of grief that it bursts fully formed from the patterns of language. As though Athena herself sprang from Z.E.U.S.'s digital calf to smack the promptfondlers in the back of the head and say “that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works”

To be clear, I would be impressed with a dog that wrote the same story, but only because it was a dog.

Lol

If someone asked me to write a metafictional short story, I would simply not.

I consider this a valuable lesson from my college education.

Lol, Altman’s AI generated purple prose slop was so bad even Eliezer called it out (as opposed to make a doomer-hype point):

Perhaps you have found some merit in that obvious slop, but I didn’t; there was entropy, cliche, and meaninglessness poured all over everything like shit over ice cream, and if there were cherries underneath I couldn’t taste it for the slop.

tbf two nickels is billions ahead of genai sector profits so far

UPDATE: I ran across a third (xcancel). Kill me.