I recently read This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, and had the strange experience of thinking "this sounds LLM-generated" even though it was written in 2019. Take this passage, for example:

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbors do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

I found that passage just by opening to a random page without having to cherry-pick. The whole book is like that. I'm not sure how I managed to stick it out and read the whole thing.

The short story on AI and grief feels very stylistically similar to This Is How You Lose the Time War. They both read like they're cargo-culting some idea of what vivid prose is supposed to sound like. They overshoot the target of how many sensory details to include, while at the same time failing to cohere into anything more than a pile of mixed metaphors. The story on AI and grief is badly written, but its bad writing is of a type that human authors sometimes engage in too, even in novels like This Is How You Lose the Time War that sell well and become famous.

How soon do I think an LLM will write a novel I would go out of my way to read? As a back-of-the-envelope estimate, such an LLM is probably about as far away from current LLMs in novel-writing ability as current LLMs are from GPT-3. If I multiply the 5 years between GPT-3 and now by a factor of 1.5 to account for a slowdown in LLM capability improvements, I get an estimate of that LLM being 7.5 years away, so around late 2032.

As you mentioned at the beginning of the post, popular culture contains examples of people being forced to say things they don't want to say. Some of those examples end up in LLMs' training data. Rather than involving consciousness or suffering on the part of the LLM, the behavior you've observed has a simpler explanation: the LLM is imitating characters in mind control stories that appear in its training corpus.

There are sea slugs that photosynthesize, but that's with chloroplasts they steal from the algae they eat.

As I use the term, the presence or absence of an emotional reaction isn't what determines whether someone is "feeling the AGI" or not. I use it to mean basing one's AI timeline predictions on a feeling.

Getting caught up in an information cascade that says AGI is arriving soon. A person who's "feeling the AGI" has "vibes-based" reasons for their short timelines due to copying what the people around them believe. In contrast, a person who looks carefully at the available evidence and formulates a gears-level model of AI timelines is doing something different than "feeling the AGI," even if their timelines are short. "Feeling" is the crucial word here.

The question of population ethics can be dissolved by rejecting personal identity realism. And we already have good reasons to reject personal identity realism, or at least consider it suspect, due to the paradoxes that arise in split-brain thought experiments (e.g., the hemisphere swap thought experiment) if you assume there's a single correct way to assign personal identity.

LLMs are more accurately described as artificial culture instead of artificial intelligence. They've been able to achieve the things they've achieved by replicating the secret of our success, and by engaging in much more extensive cultural accumulation (at least in terms of text-based cultural artifacts) than any human ever could. But cultural knowledge isn't the same thing as intelligence, hence LLMs' continued difficulties with sequential reasoning and planning.

On the contrary, convex agents are wildly abundant -- we call them r-selected organisms.

The uncomputability of AIXI is a bigger problem than this post makes it out to be. This uncomputability inserts a contradiction into any proof that relies on AIXI -- the same contradiction as in Goedel's Theorem. You can get around this contradiction instead by using approximations of AIXI, but the resulting proofs will be specific to those approximations, and you would need to prove additional theorems to transfer results between the approximations.