One more New Threat from LLMs you can worry about.

Username made this post on r/aliens about his prompt to ChatGPT to make a story about interdimensional beings. My professional job for many years was to create and write interesting stories I'm MA of dramaturgy. So I made a detailed review of LLM’s story in the comments to that post.

But it made me think about something interesting I want to share with you. There is a kind of “new” threat from LLMs to humanity that we are aware of as of now.

What are the main popular fears about AI? 1. It takes jobs from humans 2. It can gain too much control over our life 3. It might become too “wise” or crazy and bring harm to humans in the future.

Yes, those are natural and legit fears. But there is one more that I never thought about before. And it is really scary.

At some point LLM might make very good stories about/for anything! Idea of Coca-Cola promo campaign, new movie script, idea about what science experiments to do for great interesting results, political promo campaign scenario. A small bedtime story to read to your kid and a hilarious stand-up show just for you to enjoy after. And so on… Everything in this World is created from a story about it in a first place! Perfect “story content” for every occasion!

Let's make this one special for Mary from Arizona.

Here is a reminder about what is a “good story” (dramaturgy) and how to make it.

A good story has a hero, that goes through some steps to reach a certain goal. And do it in an interesting manner, so the observer is amazed/scared/feels happy and laughs/disgusted/learned new things. Something of this list. If the story is “good” it automatically means the reader of this story felt something from that list, while following the main and other characters of the story during their ways to their goals.

To make a good story you need interesting characters, valuable goals, and surprising and not obvious ways of characters to the goals.

Now we are coming back to LLMs. For now they technically follow the dramaturgy. If you ask ChatGPT to ‘make a story” about something, it will strictly follow the rules I described. It will create some characters and will describe their ways to some goals. Usually as for now, as I described on that r/aliens sub, ChatGPT only can create a “carcass of the story” but still, most interesting words and meanings in his story will come from the prompt maker. If you ask GPT to create a story about “interdimensional” and never seen before, he can’t make up something that you will be amazed with. It will connect some previously existed words from the internet to try to make a fresh sense as much as possible. But for now, it will never make up a new word or insert various side stories and details that affect the whole plot and make it not so obvious. And many other tricks and tools of good writers of today.

But this will definitely change in the future. LLMs will be better in story making someday!

Now kiss her.

And this is the scary part. We, humans, will follow their authority because they will provide us with better stories. Eventually, AI will give you a better reason to live, a nicer way to get there, more interesting things to do with your life.

My new thought here is: we don’t need to fear an AI with super high IQ to be wiser than us, and that’s why we will follow its commands as sheep. We don’t need a mighty super wise wizard for that. All we need is a good storyteller, one that creates stories for all things better than us!

This is an example of the “soft power of rational need” that switched people from TV and paper news to smartphones with touch screens. It is not a question if we accept it or not, it is a sort of natural way of things. Pattern of Entropy that will naturally occur if we don’t mess it up with our free will.

At some point, we will follow artificial AI narrative because anything we personally would suggest to do in the future about anything will be objectively less interesting and realistic than what our “big brother” would advise. You can hate it or love it but that is just a fact, same as fact that calculator can multiply large number better than you!

So don’t be scared of our new rulers and leader. It is just a new “biosphere” we are going to explore. Like some “fish” that came out to dry surface to conquer it. We will have to adapt to use our brain and live in a world of ultimate logic and perfect stories about anything. Your mood from childhood can be “softly” moderated by all stories you consume. With no need to tell that “white” is “black” like in Orwell’s stories.

Because of working with storytelling for many years, I sense there are ways to write a great story about anything you need and adjust reality through it in a needed way but in a careful manner. So the rude propaganda – is just low effort content. Real “story machine” of high quality will create a Harry Potter style universe around exactly you and make you wish to follow anything it set as a goal at the beginning.

Quite antiutopian. Let’s see how it will turn out.

For more thought experiments about storytelling as a fundamental fabric of our reality, check out this. Or just google "quantum dramaturgy"