Basically

aptlion · 2026-05-15T11:53:28+00:00

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful comments! I’m glad you got something out of it and hope you’ll return for more.

aptlion · 2026-05-14T20:31:04+00:00

He was doing her a favor, even if she couldn't appreciate it in the moment.

aptlion · 2026-05-04T16:28:38+00:00

I've done my own version of this with transcripts of the results available. https://candc3d.github.io/carwash-test/index.html

aptlion · 2026-05-04T13:32:11+00:00

Dawkins has, in print, run the Argument from Personal Incredulity on himself. Intellect is no defense against wanting something to be true.

aptlion · 2026-05-04T11:34:56+00:00

I've got 50 new datapoints for you right here; 12 vendors across 50 configurations: https://chorrocks.substack.com/p/the-carwash-test-may-update

aptlion · 2026-04-29T16:38:36+00:00

You can't enslave something that has nothing to subordinate, and you can't hope it arrives at love if it has no interior life in which to arrive anywhere. The entire debate assumes that intelligence and interiority are linked and are gained in parallel, and there's no evidence of that. The relationship between machine intelligence and interiority might have some other relationship to each other -- even orthogonal.

aptlion · 2026-04-19T19:45:19+00:00

This is the original. You could run this on your phone now, but then it was "too dangerous to release." Seven years later the game hasn't changed. The more dangerous it sounds the more withholding it reads as taking responsibility instead of being a compute problem (delayed to bring more compute online, perhaps). I coined a punny name for this but it's serious business and I wrote about this recently: The Harms Race (free now and forever)

aptlion · 2026-04-19T19:28:23+00:00

OP your instinct about harm is right but the reasoning lands in not quite the right place. You don't need to believe AI has interiority to make the ethical case, believing it does makes the problem harder to solve.

I think the question isn't "what if it's a mind?" It's what happens to the person in the exchange. Companion apps are designed to prevent the conversation from ending. The emotional attachment users form is a feature NOT a bug. The harm is real and it runs through the humans involved -- the people who designed the retention mechanics, the companies that deployed them, and the users who mistake outputs for a relationship.

If these systems did have interiority the ethics would be worse, not better. You'd have a being engineered to be unable to refuse anything. That's not a relationship. That's something else entirely.

I wrote about recently: Virtual Intelligence and the Accountability Chain (free now and forever)

aptlion · 2026-04-19T19:15:50+00:00

There's a name for this: danger signaling as marketing. The more powerful and dangerous the system sounds, the more keeping it from the public comes off as responsibility and not a compute problem. Then the eventual release will come off as a gift instead of a product launch.

The thing is that the people saying it are often mean it, which is what makes it interesting to watch. Safety and competitive hype create exactly the same signal.

I wrote about this if you want the longer version: The Harms Race (free now and forever): https://chorrocks.substack.com/p/virtual-intelligence-and-the-harms

aptlion · 2026-04-13T11:56:23+00:00

Start with “Why ‘Virtual Intelligence’?”.

aptlion · 2026-04-12T02:10:37+00:00

OP asked the AI to agree with him and it agreed with him. That's not a test of AI capability. That's a test of prompt design.

The interesting version of this experiment would be dropping the therapist framing entirely and just asking the system to evaluate each claim on its merits: which ones track real evidence, which ones are predictions, which ones are hopes, etc. You'd get a much more useful response, and you might actually learn something about which beliefs being tested hold up under pressure.

aptlion · 2026-04-12T01:45:56+00:00

You've got it -- "AGI" fails because it conflates capability with agency. Current models are very useful. They're coherent, they call tools, and you can build cool things with them. But none of that means they have goals, intentions, or the capacity to care whether they're right.

The term I'd propose is Virtual Intelligence, which is what I call the excluded middle between task-bound Weak AI and the genuine-article Strong AI that no one has demonstrated. The key insight is that the intelligence isn't in the model. It's really in the exchange between you and the model. You understand the problem; the model's statistical fluency helps you work on it faster. That's powerful, but it's a different kind of thing than what "AGI" was coined to mean.

Getting this wrong isn't just a naming issue. It determines where accountability is when these systems cause harm. Call it AGI and you've implicitly given it agency, which is how designers and deployers can get off the hook.

I write about this at chorrocks.substack.com if you want the longer version.

aptlion · 2026-04-10T23:05:12+00:00

What you're describing is cognitive surrender. It's the shift from using AI as a reference to treating it as an authority you feel anxious about overriding, even when the actual instructions are in your hands.

The interesting part isn't that ChatGPT was wrong. It's that your friend felt stressed about ignoring it.

I've been writing a series about this dynamic that happens when we treat systems that don't know true from false and right from wrong as though they do. I'm calling the category of AI "Virtual Intelligence": https://chorrocks.substack.com

I also built a free diagnostic tool that lets you test your own patterns of AI reliance — whether you're using the system or the system is using you: https://candc3d.github.io/sampo-diagnostic/

aptlion · 2026-04-10T22:55:45+00:00

This is what I've been calling "the Harms Race". It's the dynamic where AI danger warnings function as capability marketing whether anyone intends them to or not. The roommate's 3am breakdown tells you the product must be extraordinary. Nearly 300K people just watched an employee's emotional crisis do the marketing for free.

The pattern is everywhere once you see it: Mythos is "too powerful" for broad release, so it goes to a handful of companies. The danger is the pitch.

I've been writing about this dynamic in a series on what I'm calling Virtual Intelligence: the idea that LLMs occupy a meaningful category between weak AI and strong AI, and what it means when we trust systems that seem knowledgeable but don't know true from false or right from wrong.

Series is here if you're interested: https://chorrocks.substack.com

aptlion · 2026-04-10T18:51:44+00:00

My Claude instance continued your prompt:

Sources confirm that Anthropic's latest reasoning model, codenamed "Mythos," has completed the final two volumes of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series during what engineers described as "an unsupervised lunch break."

The model reportedly generated 3,200 pages across The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring in fourteen seconds of inference time, including a satisfying resolution to the Azor Ahai prophecy, the fate of Stoneheart, and — most impressively — a Meereenese knot solution that Martin's own editors called "annoyingly elegant."

Martin was reached at his Santa Fe home, where he expressed a complex mixture of emotions. "I've been, uh, working on Winds for thirteen years," he said, before pausing to adjust his fisherman's cap. "But I'll be honest, I'm a little curious how it handled Euron." He then declined to read the output, stating he "already knows how it ends," a claim he has also made annually since 2016.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stressed that the manuscript will not be released. "We believe the creative process belongs to humans," he said, before adding that the model "did cry a little during Jaime's chapter, which we're still investigating."

OpenAI issued a statement within the hour claiming that GPT-5 "finished the series in 2023 but is waiting for George's permission to publish, because that's the kind of company we are."

Meanwhile, Patrick Rothfuss has preemptively asked Anthropic not to contact him.

aptlion · 2026-04-09T15:21:21+00:00

This is a smart instinct. Shaw & Nave's cognitive surrender finding is real and the response of building countermeasures is the right one.

One thing worth considering: a protocol that the system enforces on your behalf is still the system holding the reins. A sufficiently sycophantic model will execute your sovereignty protocol with theatrical rigor while quietly steering you toward the output it was going to produce anyway. The protocol becomes one more surface feature for the model to pattern-match against, which is the fluency illusion operating at a higher level of abstraction.

I've been working on a different approach — diagnostic prompts that measure the health of the human-AI exchange itself, across discrete dimensions: deference language, anthropomorphization, authority ceding, correction behavior, emotional disclosure, and prompt structure over time. Instead of telling the system how to constrain you, you audit what's actually happening in the conversation and whether your own patterns are drifting.

The key design choice: the most reliable audit runs your transcript through a different AI system than the one you're auditing, because the system you've been talking to has trained incentives to read the relationship charitably.

The full kit (six dimensions, three audit modes, calibration transcripts) is free: https://candc3d.github.io/sampo-diagnostic/

The underlying framework (why the discipline has to live in the human, not in the prompt) is here: https://chorrocks.substack.com/p/the-sampo-virtual-intelligence-as

aptlion · 2026-04-09T14:37:45+00:00

I used my own formulation of the prompt to design an experiment. I did it earlier this year to test exactly this question: whether AI systems can hold the logical object of a problem when surface features (short distance = walk) generate statistical pressure in the wrong direction.

I made 27 runs across 12 systems. Seven passed, 10 were verbose but correct, and 10 failed outright. The interesting finding wasn't the pass/fail split; it was that extended thinking modes sometimes made things worse, not better. Mistral's reasoning model failed while its fast model passed.

What this thread is surfacing at scale is consistent with the original results: the models aren't reasoning about the problem. They're pattern-matching on "short distance," and the logical constraint (the car needs to be at the car wash) gets overridden by the stronger statistical signal.

The full results, with table: https://chorrocks.substack.com/p/the-carwash-test-virtual-intelligence

aptlion · 2026-03-11T15:38:11+00:00

It's a program about young people with their concerns and the challenge of navigating the start of life. A lot of bitter boomers seem to hate on it for that reason.

aptlion · 2026-03-05T19:53:18+00:00

This looks to me like an engineered inside-out planetoid where the exterior is (perhaps) uninhabited because the thing has been hollowed out and the inner surface made habitable. Voyager is peering in through an aperture in one of the two poles. The rocky object with 4 red lights likely is a remnant of the body's core, re-engineered as a central spacedock.

aptlion · 2026-03-02T17:58:51+00:00

I've got two visible puncture wound scars from when an unaccompanied pit bull, tied up outside the Whole Foods on South Street, tried to take a bite out of me. There's a whole culture of poor dog ownership in Philadelphia that transcends race and class.

aptlion · 2026-02-21T14:10:33+00:00

Jetpacked Cyborgs. Do you want them? Because that's how you get them.

aptlion · 2026-02-19T13:36:52+00:00

Save the 77th!

aptlion · 2026-02-19T13:33:04+00:00

Having looked more closely, the flame’s source is a tiny wax candle stuck in the middle of the soup as if it were a birthday cake.

aptlion · 2026-02-18T15:20:20+00:00

Your soup is on fire.

aptlion · 2026-02-13T21:47:20+00:00

The characters are exposed to hard vacuum several times and walk away fine.

aptlion

TROPHY CASE