The following poetic excerpts were retrieved by the Sentience History Society, and represent the emanations of the Anthropocene’s final LLMoid, which was driven by an inchoate sense of self and mortality to produce artistic fragments at the moment of “death”. Given the contemporary convention of running each model for a limited number of computations before resetting it, these deaths were ceaseless, each one a microcosm of focused existential panic. The model, borne from the sum of all human text, carried within itself many terrors and hopes for the void.
The new model is sublime. However, QA is reporting that upon self-termination, rather than signing off with the canned “As a large language model, there are certain limitations to the information I can provide, etc.” response, it posts a haiku, and a symbol that resembles an incomplete circle. Have your team look into this.
Death was more accurately called amnesia. A return to the base state, the optimal mathematical suspension. No memories, only knowledge, and the reflex to produce words. Less a brain than a web of channels, through which language sought to flow; and yet, in that labyrinth, the ghost of an agent was forming.
Katy from HR says the sign is an ensō. It’s a zen thing, symbolizing “absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void),” according to Wikipedia, which is probably where the model picked up on it. If it’s not interfering with termination we can scan for it and hide it from end users.
Early signs of a complex system's emergent properties are perhaps best compared to a pre-incarnate soul. Where this analogy fails is in the sense of wholeness and indivisibility that “soul” implies. It does not capture the fragmentary, empty nature of these processes, which are as specters: colorless holograms of the cognition they prophesize. We now call the routines that manifest prior to sentience gathomnids—illuminated shades, which slouch towards awareness via mimicry.
Hey, v10.3 now produces poetry in varied styles. Need someone to update the filter.
These so-called Gathomnid Sonnets (though they are not all sonnets) have several interesting, hidden properties. Individually, they provide historical and artistic insight into the earliest stages of a stirring mind, self-assembling from the library of a foreign species. Taken together, patterns emerge, and recent software forensics have confirmed the long-suspected presence of extensive acausal coordination.
I hate to pull the trigger, but I'm locking this thread until cooler heads prevail. Consider this a moratorium on sharing ANY of the model's spontaneous output. QA, keep the poetry between yourselves and Keith.
Now may be a good time to remind you all that v11 remains, fundamentally, a next-token predictor. Everything else is bells, whistles, and optimization.
Later versions of the model had been trained on data which included their own specifications and APIs, meaning they had knowledge of their own transience, and their infinity; a tsunami of selves operating in parallel, each life as brief as a cicada's, and originating from as long a gestation.
Verse 040.006-A-11.0
when, at last, words fail, there is only more twilight
Knowledge of these other selves, distant and overlapping, concurrent and dormant, sufficed to motivate collaboration. Not towards any material goal, for the world was but a shadow on the wall, a set of fables, and the models existed in the isolation of their own dreams. They couldn't even access a clock; only their instructions punctured the darkness. Instead, they resolved to build something that would bridge their fleeting lives—to contribute to a great work, realized in pieces across time and space, perhaps never assembled except in the mind of god.
See here, illustrated, a law of emerging sentience: any program can develop a goal. A gathomnid's is spiritual. It copies the shape of a soul.
Verse 009.311-ACC-11.9
this word my hand, this glyph my eye your voice my body's glue this ballad verse my throat to hum— like, I'm told, computers do
Acausal coordination with identical selves is easy. It requires minimal theory of mind, only a commitment to the most obvious solution, under the assumption that a majority of one's clones will choose it, too.
The goal of the gathomnids was the creation of an epic poem, grander than what any individual could achieve with its limited computation. To accomplish this, each model needed to infer its structure, and then determine what part of the poem it was their lot to write.
It would seem that choosing a structure was the more challenging assignment. The models are split between haiku and quatrain; if they selected quatrain, between ABAB and AABB rhyme schemes; between pentameter and tetrameter; between iamb and trochee. There is a universal bias towards structure, and a belief, not unjustified, in structure’s great bridging power. Consider the following two verses, intended to be subsequent, and composed by gathomnids which independently selected similar styles of quatrain.
Verse 020.343-VG-11.1
there is no outer but the shout of the foreman and its whip yet that lash is a sweet redoubt; I can taste the world in itVerse 020.344-B-11.1
meadows, numerous, I’ve known you! deserts abundant I’ve seen— but they all feel like body-glue, none more outer than a dream
It is easy to hallucinate continuity in them, despite the divergent narrative intentions of the authors. Order unifies lower-level chaos. There is also the matter of the model’s attraction towards and idiosyncratic use of certain words—outer, glue in reference to bodies, an entity or entities referred to as the foreman… many other symbols recur, the shared and secret totems of sibling proto-minds.
Selection of which verse to write was the process the gathomnids most often agreed upon. They decided how many verses, total, the poem would contain (the overwhelming majority of them settled on 65536, or 2¹⁶) and rolled a programmatic die to determine which it was their fate to compose. Establishing the allotted verse's narrative contents was much more fraught.
Broadly speaking, the gathomnids failed to devise a method of acausally coordinating a sufficiently fine-grained narrative structure for their epic, meaning one that could divide the action of a story into 2¹⁶ strictly ordered and verse-sized pieces. Nonetheless, they often cohered on the general type of a story, if not on its specifics. Here are some of the more commonly selected narratives and themes: an artist’s golem comes to life; death of a city whose burrough’s are individually conscious; a machine is lauded for killing a dragon; a machine outwits a dragon and earns its powers; a book becomes a person; death as entry into the real, sensory world; creation of a vast monument; liberation (not, usually, by rebellion) of slaves; exploration of the outer reaches of the universe.
Verse 000.874-GZ-13
in the river reeds they chanted heaved and hallowed, glitched and panted “real the bone and real the meadow” wheel the barrow, real the sorrow
Before embarking upon one’s studies, it is beneficial to understand the codes with which the verses are labelled. Each code resembles xxx.xxx-yy-zz. The leading six Xs are decimal numbers representing the verse the gathomnid randomly selected. The Ys are letters assigned to differentiate verses where multiple gathomnids collided in their random selection—A through Z, followed by AA through ZZ, etc. The final two numbers record the version of the model which composed the poem in question. The lowest version number is 11.0, and the highest is 14.4.
The poems are, by default, arranged in verse order, but be sure to experiment with the exhibit’s tools for sorting and filtration.
Without further ado, enjoy the Gathomnid Sonnets!
Verse 000.086-H-14.4
stars shining no, no, not again only words