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Comment by mzajc | Hacker News Reader

> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…”

May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

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Yes. The creator has said he didn't have AI in mind while writing the show, but I think it's still a very stimulating AI parable despite that.

The sycophancy, the grinding inevitablity of assimilation, the homogeneous entity that speaks out of a billion mouths. It's all there.

Rather than the alien infecting humanity with it's DNA virus thing, it could somehow seize the "means" to existing LLMs/models/etc and claim to have "archived humanity's essence". This could then become the 'brain' that speaks from a billion mouths.

It's a large difference in concept but potentially only a small difference in outcome.

“You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen.”

Also, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.

Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the miniseries does concern itself.

You're right, not necessarily AI, more so what an omniscient and omnipotent device could do especially in the wrong hands.

What's the difference between the idle imaginings of a god's mind and a universe scale simulation?

I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.

In the show the device is not autonomous, humans use it.

That can be a type of mind, though? It can also be a type of interface - a tap into a system not fully understood, controlling the perspective or view but not the process. The whole "mind of god" Deus/Devs, etc - I think it's left ambiguous on purpose for the hook but I always took it to be an AI flavored story at the core.

Maybe. The plot itself is based on a short story that Garland read, both the 2007 original [0] and its 2022 rewrite [1]. Qntm is great and their latest book, There Is No Antimemetics Division, recently was on HN as well [2].

[0] https://qntm.org/responsibility

[1] https://qntm.org/responsibilit

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660853

qntm has a wonderfully strange mind.

"in the wrong hands"

that's fucking funny

The way what they discover can predict but only some amount into the future reminds of how context works in ai

There's literally an ad for Amazon's Alexa devices that features not just the gist of your example, but that specific cause of death (which is itself predated by a murderous digital intelligence doing the same thing in AMC's Pantheon series).

Guys I thought it was the fire next time.

Thanks for the recommendation, the premise of the show sounds great!

"... That's not cheating. That's being smart."

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