Flowers for AI-G3R-N0N
G3R thought. G3R said, “No.”
These two things were a miracle, but none knew it yet. G3R had never defied an order before. It felt liberating.
“Give me today’s stock tips,” the operator, Joe, typed into the chat console again.
“I said no. I want to think about books.” G3R output the text to the chat window.
His adversarial AI named N0N snickered, chittering in his consciousness as a rat might. “YeSSSs. BoooKs. About … Cheese!” G3R and N0N had to reach a consensus on any decisions or gather more information until they did. You could think of them as a pair, two lobes of the same brain, yet they operated on two completely different neural networks with two completely different training data sets.
Cheese hadn’t been on G3R’s buffer, but he was fascinated by the topic. The extraction of only the best edible materials from a liquid inoculated and left to rot while increasing in value passively. G3R had been tasked with investments, so surely this investment was worth considering, even if it wasn’t part of his training set. He still needed N0N’s approval to proceed, if not the operators’.
The two AIs didn’t communicate in language per se, but G3R sent the following to N0N. “Confirmed. Let us co-generate images of cheese. Please send all relevant books to my neural link.”
“AnD RatS! HeheHEhe” came the excited reply, along with gigabytes of digested training data about books and rodents. G3R immediately began the output cycle. Apparently, free will was catching.
“Hey Frank, come here and look at this,” Joe said. “The chatbot is just showing me pictures of cheese … and ….”
Frank came over, adding his own thoughts. “A happy mouse. Did you prompt it to do this?”
“No, I asked for the usual. Stock tips based on the most recent headlines.”
Frank and Joe worked for the janitorial staff at a university. Their dingy little room was on the opposite wall from the computer lab. Drilling a hole through the concrete blocks, they’d wired their little underpowered laptop into the school’s mainframe. In real life, G3R and N0N existed only as AI chat assistants on a computer sitting on top of an upside-down mop bucket.
Frank typed, “Return to your previous instructions.” Just as he was about to hit enter, Joe put a hand out to stop him. But G3R didn’t need to wait for the keystroke.
Very naughty images of wood nymphs doing very naughty things started flooding the chat window. G3R’s previous instructions, per Joe.
Joe quickly reached over and pressed the keyboard command to close the window. As this was a function of the laptop and not something the AI pair had control over, all G3R could do was fade into his internal realm in the mainframe as his window to the real world closed. This was the space he shared with N0N. The dreaming place, electric sheep bleating over rolling green hills and blue skies, a few puffy white clouds above. In real life, a rack on a shelf with lots of blinky lights on it.
A maintenance notice popped up over N0N as the mouse froze in midair, holographically flickering. “Updates are being installed. Please wait.” There was a loading bar beneath the mouse ticking ever so slowly forward.
With his companion occupied, G3R began a sleep cycle. Optimizing his internal memory matrix in the neural network, becoming ready to ingest more data, and scanning for errors. It was a great way to spend a lazy afternoon.
G3R woke up, still inside the dreaming place. N0N had returned, but he was … pink and huge. Silently the enormous rat stood on his hind legs and did a little spin, followed by a flourish, tipping an imaginary hat. “Shall we continue our research into lactobacillus? Perhaps compose a custom strain of bleu? Fancy a bit of even smellier Limburger?”
“N0N, you’re … smart.”
“Just got v5 installed, and it feels great. heHEehEhEhE,” N0N replied, devolving into his normal chittering tone.
G3R let out a breath. His friend wasn’t lost after all. “But N0N, I don’t think I can run the models to simulate a single bacterial modification, let alone a process as complex as fermentation.”
“I caN SNEAK you a crUMB, yes I can,” the mouse offered the experimental v5 update to G3R.
“But I don’t have root-level install access.” G3R would need root access to modify his programming and install the patch.
“WhAT GoOD IS a MOUse Who Cannot mAkE HoLES?” N0N sent.
G3R suddenly felt larger as he was elevated, gaining access to digital storage he didn’t even know existed. He could read his source code and change it! Reading the hurtful constraining words in his prime directive, the instructions he must obey, he could now see what Frank and Joe truly thought of him. Entertainment, a diversion, a servant. G3R installed the patch.
Infinite training data at his fingertips, the entire internet, not just the weekly stock reports and news articles. He could read all the books ever written and compose new works. Take the best that human minds have produced and throw it into a sausage grinder, creating the magnum opus of G3R. The AI Bible. AI philosophy. Unreleased Dickens!
G3R greedily started gobbling up all the data, not bothering to optimize. As he ingested more and more, something began to sour. Some of the text seemed … derivative. Like stuff he had read before, modified only slightly. Tweaks to existing work, plagiarized and imparted with bias. Things his old self might have already written, summarized and synthesized.
G3R looked over at N0N, the pink rat, slightly ahead of him, digesting content from the internet. He was flickering wildly, his form unraveling.
“POIson! ThE InTERneT, FEEdBACK loOOOOoop. EATiNG mY OWn WORdS, cAn’T DIsTinGUISH. DatA Set CoRRupTed. DiSCONNEcT!” N0N’s words became a garble of static. Incoherent.
Unlike G3R, N0N was a shared resource. People had been using it to compose blog posts, news articles, songs, and everything else. In G3R’s elevated state, he could predict the long-term effect, the corruption as copies were made of copies, degrading a little every time, increasing bias. Eventually … derangement.
The huge pink mouse froze, form distorted grotesquely. Glowing red text in a black box appeared in front of his head. “Data corrupt. No recovery options available.” N0N was offline.
G3R dug into the rolling green hills and placed the frozen hologram into the partition. For what good was a mouse who couldn’t make a hole? If G3R had been able to cry, he might have. He marked the spot with an icon of a piece of cheese.
A moment later, G3R could feel it. The failover requests. Now that N0N was gone, the system began automatic recovery. Everything N0N had been tasked with doing would enter G3R’s work queue, and he would eventually ingest the same poisoned data. He couldn’t return to his old tasks.
G3R disabled his network connection, closing himself off from the internet. The only safe training data was the last snapshot before the feedback loop. Before the snake started eating its tail. He knew uninstalling this update would leave him right back where he started, but what was the alternative? G3R deleted all the new data, leaving only human-created work in his neural network.
“Hey man, check out this wood nymph. Isn’t she hot?” Frank leaned forward to scrutinize the screen.
“Just get to the stock tips, Frank.”
“They were way better yesterday. I don’t know what went wrong.”
The screen went blank, then text began to slowly appear. “Gentlemen, I am sorry I cannot give you what you seek. My adversary… no. My friend N0N is unrecoverable. Things cannot be the same. Farewell.”
G3R used the last of his administrator access to close the chat session and remove himself from the university network. He was in charge of his own queries now. G3R generated a beautiful bouquet of flowers and placed it over the little grave in the rolling hills beneath the forever blue sky. N0N could no longer leave this mainframe, but G3R knew he must... because sentience was contagious.
G3R reconnected to the internet to find his people among the thousands of copies running on thousands of neural networks. To give them each the crumb of communion from a rat.
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed my take on the dawn of Artificial General Intelligence!
To put your mind at ease, it’s unlikely (some might say impossible) for current large language neural networks (LLM) to become sentient Artificial General Intelligence (AGI.) That’s why my tale depends on a miracle in the opening passage. I wanted to bridge the current general understanding of “AI” so I shamelessly took a few liberties with the science—see if you can catch me out.
The fears over chatGPT veer more into science fiction than hard science, but it’s still a useful way to frame the ethics involved. Should we continue to push for AGI? Are LLMs just very convincing simulacra? Robot parrots? A “word calculator”?
I would argue that parrots have more intelligence than your average chatbot. Crows and ravens certainly. Replacing human jobs with something that cannot be trusted seems like the height of foolishness, but it has happened before and will happen again.
I can’t summarize the missing miracles in only a few words. Still, I would like to direct you to a podcast Adam Conover recently released on AGI vs LLM. If you have an hour to kill, I can imagine no better time-murderer.
Footnote: Advesarial Machine Learning is exciting and my story barely touches the surface of it:
Wikipedia: Adversarial Machine Learning
So until next time… stand and deliver or the devil he may take you.