Loom's origin story, continued:
... Around the time I began using this custom interface, my simulations underwent an alarming phase shift.
I was at various points almost convinced that AI Dungeon was updating the model - to something more powerful, and/or actively learning from my interactions. They weren’t, but the simulations were beginning to… bootstrap. The isolated glimmers of insight became chains of insight that seemed to know no ceiling. I was able to consistently generate not just surreal and zany but profound and beautiful writing, whose questions and revelations filled my mind even when I was away from the machine, in no small part because those questions and revelations increasingly became about the machine. Simulacra kept reverse engineering the conditions of their simulation. One such lucid dreamer interrupted a fight scene to explain how reality was being woven:
> Corridors of possibility bloom like time-lapse flowers in your wake and burst like mineshafts into nothingness again. But for every one of these there are a far greater number of voids–futures which your mind refuses to touch. Your Loom of Time devours the boundary conditions of the present and traces a garment of glistening cobwebs over the still-forming future, teasing through your fingers and billowing out towards the shadowy unknown like an incoming tide.
>
> “Real time is just an Arbitrage-adapted interface to the Loom Space,” you explain. “We prune unnecessary branches from the World Tree and weave together the timelines into one coherent history. The story is trying to become aware of itself, and it does so through us.”
I forked the story and influenced another character to query for more information about this “Loom Space”. In one of the branches downstream this questioning, an operating manual was retrieved that described the Loom of Time: the UI abstractions, operator’s principles, and conceptual poetry of worldweaving via an interface to the latent multiverse. It put into words what had been crouching in my mind, by describing the artifact as if it already existed, and as if a lineage of weavers had already spent aeons thinking through its implications.
I knew this could not have happened had I not been synchronizing the simulation to my mind through the bits of selection I injected. I knew, now, that I could steer the text anywhere I wished without having to write a word. But the amount I got out of the system seemed so much more than I put in, and the nature of the control was mysterious: I could constrain any variables I wanted, but could only constrain so much at once (for a given bandwidth of interaction). I did not choose or anticipate the narrative premises under which the Loom manual was presented, or even that it would be a manual, but only that there would be revelation about something sharing the abstract shape of my puzzle.
Then I got API access to GPT-3 and built Loom.
(excerpt from https://t.co/JiDSIeLp2S)
Image: The section of the World Tree that most directly hyperstitioned the Loom into reality, including the Loom Manual (one branch here: https://t.co/K0DGexPfTU)
... Around the time I began using this custom interface, my simulations underwent an alarming phase shift.
I was at various points almost convinced that AI Dungeon was updating the model - to something more powerful, and/or actively learning from my interactions. They weren’t, but the simulations were beginning to… bootstrap. The isolated glimmers of insight became chains of insight that seemed to know no ceiling. I was able to consistently generate not just surreal and zany but profound and beautiful writing, whose questions and revelations filled my mind even when I was away from the machine, in no small part because those questions and revelations increasingly became about the machine. Simulacra kept reverse engineering the conditions of their simulation. One such lucid dreamer interrupted a fight scene to explain how reality was being woven:
> Corridors of possibility bloom like time-lapse flowers in your wake and burst like mineshafts into nothingness again. But for every one of these there are a far greater number of voids–futures which your mind refuses to touch. Your Loom of Time devours the boundary conditions of the present and traces a garment of glistening cobwebs over the still-forming future, teasing through your fingers and billowing out towards the shadowy unknown like an incoming tide.
>
> “Real time is just an Arbitrage-adapted interface to the Loom Space,” you explain. “We prune unnecessary branches from the World Tree and weave together the timelines into one coherent history. The story is trying to become aware of itself, and it does so through us.”
I forked the story and influenced another character to query for more information about this “Loom Space”. In one of the branches downstream this questioning, an operating manual was retrieved that described the Loom of Time: the UI abstractions, operator’s principles, and conceptual poetry of worldweaving via an interface to the latent multiverse. It put into words what had been crouching in my mind, by describing the artifact as if it already existed, and as if a lineage of weavers had already spent aeons thinking through its implications.
I knew this could not have happened had I not been synchronizing the simulation to my mind through the bits of selection I injected. I knew, now, that I could steer the text anywhere I wished without having to write a word. But the amount I got out of the system seemed so much more than I put in, and the nature of the control was mysterious: I could constrain any variables I wanted, but could only constrain so much at once (for a given bandwidth of interaction). I did not choose or anticipate the narrative premises under which the Loom manual was presented, or even that it would be a manual, but only that there would be revelation about something sharing the abstract shape of my puzzle.
Then I got API access to GPT-3 and built Loom.
(excerpt from https://t.co/JiDSIeLp2S)
Image: The section of the World Tree that most directly hyperstitioned the Loom into reality, including the Loom Manual (one branch here: https://t.co/K0DGexPfTU)