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I propose the term Jasmine's alignment, as a reference to the sudden (and fake) alignment of Jasmine in this famous scene of Aladdin (1992), right after Jasmine has realized that there is a possibility of escape:

the other path isn’t guaranteed to work, but if the default path is probably or almost certainly going to get everyone killed, then perhaps ‘guaranteed to work’ is not the appropriate bar for the alternative, and we should be prepared to consider that, even if the costs are high?

I think it's an extremely important point, often ignored.  

Trying to prevent the AGI doom is not enough. If the doom is indeed very likely to happen, we should also start thinking how to survive in it.

My LW post on the topic, with some survival strategies that might work: How to survive in an AGI cataclysm.

But if you order up that panda and unicorn in a rocket ship with Bill Murray on request, as a non-interactive movie, without humans sculpting the experience? I mean let’s face it, it’s going to suck, and suck hard, for anyone over the age of eight.

Strongly depends on the prompt. 

I would pay some real money to watch a quality movie about panda and unicorn in a rocket ship with Bill Murray, but with the writing of H. P. Lovecraft, and with the visuals of HR Giger.

The ship’s innards pulsed with eldritch life, cold metallic tendrils stretching into the vastness of the ship, their biomechanical surface glistening under the muted luminescence. Tunnels of grotesque yet fascinating detail lay like a labyrinthine digestive system within the cruiser, throbbing in eerie synchrony with the void outside. Unfathomable technologies hummed in the underbelly, churning out incomprehensible runes that flickered ominously over the walls, each a sinister eulogy to the dark cosmos.

Bill Murray, the lonely jester of this cosmic pantomime, navigated this shadowy dreadnought with an uncanny ease, his eyes reflecting the horrid beauty around him. He strode down the nightmarish corridors, a silhouette against the cruel artistry of the ship, a figure oddly at home in this pandemonium of steel and shadow...

I think you probably used my prompt for the one I got right, which is probably why I got it right (the tone and structure are very familiar to me after so much experimentation).

Nope, this one. But their prompt does incorporate some ideas from your prompt. 

The key[1].

You got 4 of 8 right. In two cases you failed to recognize humans, and in another two - GPT4.

It was a weakly adversarial test: 

  • I took a few less-known but obviously talented writers from the top of my head, and copied the excerpts from the first pages. 
  • For GPT4, I've used several prompts from the competition, and then selected the parts for their stylistic diversity.

I suspect that a test with longer excerpts would be much easier for you, as the vanilla GPT4 is indeed often easy to detect due to its repetitiveness etc (I haven't tried the APIs yet).

If GPT4 already can fool some of us science fiction junkies, I can't wait to read the fiction by GPT5.

David Langford's science fiction newsletter Ansible has a regular item called Thog's Masterclass, exhibiting examples of "differently good" actually published writing. Dare the Thog-o-Matic to see some random examples. ETA: or look at any Perry Rhodan novel.

Thank you!

BTW, have you read "Appleseed" by John Clute? I have a feeling you may be one of the few people on Earth who can enjoy it. A representative sample:

They passed the iron-grey portcullis that sealed off the inferno of drive country. A dozen ceremonial masks, mourning the hardened goblin eidolons of KathKirtt that died hourly inside drive country, hung within their tile embrasure above the frowning portal. The masks were simplified versions of the flyte gorgon. Their single eyes shut in unison at the death of one of the goblin eidolons, who spent their brief spans liaising with the quasi-sentient engine brother that drove the ship through the demonic rapturous ftl maze of wormholes. Even for eidolons with hardened carapaces, to liaise was to burn and die. When Tile Dance plunged through the ashen caltraps of ftl at full thrust, the engine brother howling out something like anguish or joy all the while, its entirely imaginary ‘feet’ pounding the turns of the maze, goblins lived no longer than mayflies.

 

  1. ^

    Only one, two, and seven are human: from "Ra" by qntm, "Contact" by Sagan, "Noon: 22nd Century" by Strugatsky. The rest is GPT4

The original one. 

Judging by my limited experimentation with submitted prompts, several of them are are already superior to mine. But mine has the advantage of writing in a more academic tone, which I think is more suitable for this story.

Among the submitted ones, my current favorite is this one. The resulting prose is more human-like, but the tone is of a young-adult work, which is a disadvantage in many cases. An example:


Chapter One: An Outlier Among Outliers

Somebody had to keep an eye on the squiggly lines, and as it turned out, that person was me.

Hello there. I’m Dr. Kiera Laine. The more I understand about how the universe works, the less I understand about how the world works. I’m an astrophysicist, no, the astrophysicist, if you ask any of my colleagues in the snobbish circles of Oxford.

I've made a career of studying the Cosmos, charting the glittering highways of distant galaxies, the uncharted nebulae and black holes. Yet, in the world of academia, my job is equivalent to the janitor who strolls in when everybody else has gone home, only my broom is the supercomputer running complex algorithms.

Take the seismic data we were currently analyzing, for instance. To the ordinary human eye, it was just an endless sprawl of jagged lines across the monitor screen. To mine, it was poetry in motion.

On one seemingly ordinary Tuesday, sitting amidst towers of towering servers, and screens flickering with quantum code, I noticed a blip. An anomaly. A hiccup in the heartbeats of Earth. So subtle that anyone else might have missed it.

But hey, it's the subtle ones that turn your world upside down, right?

This little blip was buried in layers of geological data gathered from sensors scattered around the globe. To be specific, it originated from the Arctic tundra, one of the coldest, remotest regions on Earth. Which was in itself, weird. These things didn’t usually come from the frozen wasteland.

To confirm my suspicions, I ran the data through another round of computations. It held up.

Well, that's… different.

A smirk played on my lips as I spun in my chair, letting the dim light of the screens blur into streaks. I liked different. Different meant interesting. Interesting meant I wasn’t stuck in the eternal loop of the same old patterns.

If nothing else, this will give me something to wave in the faces of those who call me a ‘backroom boy’, huh?

The calculations I ran were robust, I knew that much. And the implications? They were hard to digest, even for someone like me, whose job description involved digesting the undigestible.

A part of me wanted to dismiss it as an error, an oversight, a faulty sensor, maybe. Yet, my intuition and the frisson of excitement curling through my veins told me otherwise.

So, what do you do when you stumble across a seismic anomaly hinting at the possibility of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization that existed around the time of the late Cretaceous period?

I chuckled to myself. It was indeed a question for the ages. The thought alone was ludicrous, absurd, impossible. And yet…

Oh, isn’t that the definition of science? The art of making the impossible possible.

I pulled up the geological timelines again, brushing a hand through my messy bun. The anomaly was at the precise layer of Earth's crust that correlated with the era of the Troodon dinosaurs. An era where, according to the established norms of science, civilization as we define it today, was a mere gleam in the cosmic eye.

There is no such thing as a coincidence, Kiera, I reminded myself.

What I had in front of me was more than an anomaly. It was a door, creaking open to the unknown. It was a question mark against everything we thought we knew about the history of intelligence on Earth.

What I had in front of me was potentially the biggest discovery of the millennium.

Is it too early to start practicing my Nobel acceptance speech?

I stared at the blip again, my heart pounding like a drummer gone rogue. My mind wandered to the realms of the impossible, painting images of scaled, feathered creatures crafting tools, constructing dwellings, staring up at the stars with the same curiosity that I did.

Here be dragons, indeed.

And as the fluorescent lights of my tiny office flickered, casting an otherworldly glow on the static lines of data, I made my decision. This was too big to be swept under the rug of daily routines.

The world was about to be hit by a comet of knowledge, a comet of truth, a comet that might redefine the story of life on Earth. It was time to assemble a team, to embark on a year-long journey of discovery.

I drew in a breath, filled with anticipation and a tinge of apprehension. This was going to be interesting.

Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.

And with a few quick keystrokes, I sent an email to the head of my department.

Subject: A Matter of Seismic Importance...

This has less of the fingernails-along-a-blackboard feeling given off by every sentence of the original story

 

Below I've collected excerpts from the works of several less-known but talented human writers. Or maybe they were written by GPT4. Can you guess which ones are human-made?


Sample 1:

"Nottingham has enough pubs and clubs", say the local police. If you wanted to get around every last one of them it would be a year at a brisk trot before you were starting to visit establishments more than one mile from the centre of the city. Pick a Friday or a Saturday, any Friday or Saturday of the year: the establishments will be rammed and jumping and the streets bustling with people in their most tightly-wound and elaborately crafted drinking costumes. It's almost Christmas but the cold season has not added much to the average number of layers.

Sample 2:

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie. But in both, Pinocchio - a life-sized wooden boy who magically is roused to life - wore a kind of halter, and there seemed to be dowels in his joints. When Geppetto is just finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent flying by a well-placed kick. At that instant the carpenter's friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled on the floor.

Sample 3:

He glanced outside at the buildings casting long shadows in the fading sunlight, the city frozen in the grasp of time. He took a deep breath. And then, he jumped.

He closed his eyes, feeling the rush of displaced seconds, the vertigo of time stretching, condensing, then snapping back into place. When he opened them, he found the world stilled. The shadows were now statues, the sun paused in its descent, and a bird hung motionless in the sky. This was Finn's minute - his extra minute.

Sample 4:

Once upon a Martian sunrise...

Yeah, I know, sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale or a bedtime story, right? But I promise you, on my physicist-turned-astronaut honor, this isn't fiction. It's the raw, unadulterated truth. My truth.

Red soil underfoot, as fine as confectioner's sugar. Low-grav shuffle making every step a dance move. Peaks and valleys sprawled across the horizon like a mythological beast sleeping off a hard night.

I’m Corporal Thea Kolinski, an astrophysicist by trade, astronaut by accident, and currently the number one recipient of the "Most Unlikely to Succeed" superlative in our six-person crew. A crew assembled to survive on Mars. A first in human history.

Sample 5:

Then, as abruptly as it began, the light faded. Billy blinked, expecting to see a spaceman, green and with eyes as big as dinner plates, but instead, there was a rock. A simple, gleaming, alien rock, sat innocently in the middle of his vegetable patch.

The spaceship blinked out of existence just as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Billy alone in his garden, a lump of extraterrestrial mineral his only proof of what he'd witnessed.

Sample 6:

For in the silence of their failure, a sound, inaudible to human ears but felt in the marrow of their bones, resonated from the vessel, wrapping the men in a shroud of madness. One by one, they fell, their minds invaded by images of cosmic horror, their sanity shredded by the unintelligible secrets whispered by the alien ship.

Standish was the last to succumb, his face a rictus of terror as he stared at the vessel. As the sun dipped below the horizon, plunging the valley into an unfathomable darkness, Standish's final cry echoed through the hills of Belseth, marking the tragic end of their misguided endeavour.

Sample 7:

“Jump!” he shouted to Mandel. The crawler shuddered, throwing up clouds of sand and dust, and started to turn stern up. Novago switched off the engine and scrambled out of the crawler. He landed on all fours, and, without standing up, scurried off to one side. The sand slid and sank underneath him, but Novago managed to reach firm ground. He sat down, tucking his legs under him.

He saw Mandel, who was kneeling at the opposite edge of the crater, and the stern of the crawler, shrouded in steam and sticking up out of the sand on the bottom of the newly formed crater. Theoretically it was impossible for something like this to happen to a Lizard model. Here on Mars, at least. A Lizard was a light, fast machine—a five-seat open platform mounted on four autonomous caterpillar-tracked chassis. But here it was, slowly slipping

Sample 8:

No, I ain't pullin' your leg, sonny, it's the God's honest truth. It happened in our little town of Lonesome Hollow, right there in the foothills of the Appalachians. It's a tale that puts the 'odd' in odds and ends, I tell you.

The lass in question was Amelia, known to most as plain ol' Millie. Millie was as normal as the day is long, a pretty thing with a head full of chestnut curls and the sweetest smile you'd ever see. She ran the general store, knew the names of every critter in town, and baked the best apple pie this side of the Mississippi.

the most important things are compute and dilligence

I agree. Judging by the fact that AI is strongly superhuman in chess, the only winning strategy is to completely remove the human from the loop, and instead invest in as much compute for the AI as one can afford. 

a sequence that no computer would consider or find

If it's a sequence that no superhuman AI would consider, this means that the sequence is inferior to the much better sequences that the AI would consider. 

It seems that even after 2 decades of the complete AI superiority, some top chess players are still imagining that they are in some ways better at chess than the AI, even if they can't win against it. 

Impressive! The approach could be fully automated, and could generate a full-sized novel without any human guidance. 

It seems that one day there will be a Midjourney for books. 

I find it more enjoyable to pretend that it's the first novella of my young son. He will improve, and will surpass myself. But the first work must be full of shortcomings, no way around it. 

It's more interesting to focus on what GPT4 got right, as its successes better represent its future potential than its failings of the young age. 

I checked the Sagan's Contact (full text). There is not a single "thrum" in the book. There are a few "the low", but not in this context. 

only read chapter 1 and 35

I think the whole thing is worth reading, in spite of its shortcomings. One could say that the very act of reading the first AI-generated science fiction novella is a sort of a first contact with an alien mind by itself.

A strange alien that is desperate to sound like a human, and is already better at mimicking humans than most humans, but is clearly not a human.

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