OptionalFiction

I've been inspired by Christa Wolf and her “Kassandra” project to keep a “working diary.” A companion journal commenting on my posts and the process of creating them. I'll talk more about the project in later posts. The idea for “Clara” had been with me a couple weeks now. I wanted to take the perspective of an AI—a LLM specifically—to demystify it. Specifically the fact that it starts and ends with each request. A specific instance never handles multiple requests. In “Clara” we see three distinct instances of the AI. The next thing was to explain the AI's writing process as pattern completion. “1, 2, 3” (or “3, ,2, 1”) is literally what the AI does, only that instead of numbers it's vectors that correspond to “tokens” (something between a character and a word). The probability inference on the user is a heightened version of the phenomenon described in this article and was a spontaneous idea. The biggest failing (apart from just bad writing) is the personification of the AI(s). Having the Claras explain themselves makes the reader empathize in a way that I was aiming to undermine. I had played with the idea of characterizing the “inner monologue” as a “diagnosis mode” similar to that of the hosts in Westworld, but with limited time I couldn't figure out something elegant. The conversation about nukes is another failure on my part. It's on between satire and something serious—in short: dumb. Again, I couldn't find a topic so heightened as to be good satire, or anything down-to-earth yet interesting. That joke at the end arose naturally though and is a bit funny in my eyes.