Jason Rohrer’s Project December: AI seances at $10 a pop
Hey, chatbot entrepreneurs, let’s prey on the grieving! Project December will “simulate the dead” for just $10 a session. You select from a list of personality traits, add names of relatives and pe…
with early "grieftech" entepreneur Helena Blavatsky
Oh no. I mainly knew Jason Rohrer for his video games. For a few minutes I hoped this was some elaborate prank, but apparently he drank the Kool-Aid. He wrote that Project December’s chatbot was arguably the first machine with a soul. I preferred the playful minimalist existentialism of Passage.
ngl his stuff always felt a bit cynical to me, in that it seemed to exist more to say "look, video games can have a deep message!" than it did to just have such a message in the first place. Like it existed more to gesture at the concept of meaningfulness rather than to be meaningful itself.
Yeah in retrospect I see what you mean.
always great* when someone does something that sucks so much it makes his previous work suck retrospectively
Addressing the “in hell” response that made headlines at Sundance, Rohrer said the statement came after 85 back-and-forth exchanges in which Angel and the AI discussed long hours working in the “treatment center,” working with “mostly addicts.”
We know 85 is the upper bound, but I wonder what Rohrer would consider the minimum number of "exchanges" acceptable for telling someone their loved one is in hell? Like, is 20 in "Hey, not cool" territory, but it's all good once you get to 50? 40?
Rohrer says that when Angel asked if Cameroun was working or haunting the treatment center in heaven, the AI responded, “Nope, in hell.”
“They had already fully established that he wasn't in heaven,” Rohrer said.
Always a good sign when your best defense of the horrible thing your chatbot says is that it's in context.
it’s very telling that 85 messages is considered a lot. your grief better resolve quick before the model loses coherency and starts digging quotes out of a plagiarized horror movie script
fuck it’s gross how one of the common use cases for LLMs is targeting vulnerable people with the hope they’ll develop a parasocial relationship with your service, so you can keep charging them forever
TBF what's the difference between a "AI" seance and a "real" one? It's not like one is less of a grift than the other.
TECHNOLOGY!!
That's the problem.
Maybe I'm just reading the room wrong, but the consensus of the comment section seems to be "haha he thinks AI can replace psychics" but all psychics do is take what people said, reframe it and maybe add some nonsense after that can sound vaguely correct. For the most part, that is LLMs. LLMs could replace the psychic industry because unlike other professions there's zero obligation to be correct about anything.
Is it unethical? Absolutely. But psychics are already frauds so it's not like a legitimate profession is being replaced.
Of course, I could just be misreading the room.
All my homies hate Helena Blavatsky. Her grifty bullshit has caused so much human misery.
This Rohrer sack of shit is a worthy successor.
Jason Rohrer saw a black guy once and it provoked him to write a video game about the castle doctrine
our readers bring us cursèd knowledge like a dead plague rat dropped at our feet
oh fuck he's that asshole? the one that was so petty about a negative Polygon review for said game that he stalked the reviewer's Twitter page until he could find a quote to mangle into a recommendation to put on the game's Steam page? including the reviewer's full name, against the reviewer's repeated, explicit wishes for it to be removed?
I suddenly feel a lot less bad about him having his game copied and re-sold because he released it under public domain. Maybe the 'left' in copyleft scared him
Hateful and stupid 🤝
Obviously they should have trained the AI on text from John Edwards' Crossing Over. /s
But seriously, I worry when one of these hacks figures out how to make the word multipliers approximate a cold reading.
oh for fucks sake, will these people never cease to exist? what a cancerous bunch.