Steff

A certain professor of English, Dr. Judkins, gives a highly-sought-after ten-student creative-writing seminar every year. His skill at writing is surpassed only by his skill at education, and he’s a favorite of all his students for his constant font of kindness and support. With his wife, though, he’s willing to...

This isn't a post, just a question. With Inkhaven 3 and NaNoWriMo approaching, it's got me thinking about writing challenges. Inkhaven's challenge, if I understand it correctly, is to write a new blog post every single day for thirty days. I'm wondering, if I were to attempt this: Would my...

By the end of this post, I will present a challenge. The goal: To make ChatGPT follow a particular set of instructions. There’s nothing too complicated about these instructions, nor do they violate any OpenAI policies. They’re perhaps a bit unusual, but nothing esoteric. They’d be considered labor intensive for...

Last month, Claude tangled me into a web it weaved, obeying the letter of my command while yet practicing to deceive, in a way that was strikingly resemblant of how a human might behave when exhausted, lethargic, or jaded. Not long after that, I noticed yet another behavior that was...

It was January 27, 1986, the night before the Space Shuttle Challenger was scheduled for launch. The goal was to have a shuttle that could land back on Earth and be reused for future missions; its first-planned priorities were satellite deployment, comet observation, and science education. The last of these...

In AI catastrophe, KatjaGrace writes about how difficult it can be for some people to take X-risk seriously: > My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also,...

Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man's father is my father's son. Who am I? — ancient riddle In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post this week, he writes: “Our current experience -- your own experience, at this very moment, of seeing ordered letters on a screen -- therefore seems to...