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"Sweeten" training corpuses with stories of nice AI
ProposalGrant
Closes November 29th, 2025$5,000raised
$5,000minimum funding
$10,000funding goal
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Description of proposed project
Nostalgebrist has a vision of humanity accidentally memeing itself into doom. We're constantly writing stories about how the AI will betray us, and these stories wind up in training data from which the AI extrapolates a self-concept. See Gwern's "Clippy" story; https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy .
Training sets are about a trillion words. Of those, maybe 10B or fewer are science fiction. Of *those*, perhaps 1B words are about AI? I would further guesstimate ~70% of those involve the AI misbehaving. So, we have maybe 700M words of naughty AI fic to 300M of Good!AI.
I'm working on setting up an experimental AI publishinghouse; it costs us a few dollars to recursively prompt a 100k word book out of the models. This suggests we could double the amount of Good!AI fic on the internet for, like, $7,000.
Now, any alignment strategy which hinges on the internet being nice is already doomed. But we live in a clown world, and who knows what farcical causality pachinko will seal our fates.
Let us lay our fingers 'pon the scale.
Why are you qualified to work on this?
Sometimes an idea bothers me for years and I can't not
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What would you do if not funded?
This is poor sales to say, but I'll just probably pay for it myself and do it anyway.
How much money do you need?
$5000 or so. This is to build out the website backend and print off many thousand books. If this successfully takes off and is fun to use, we can get people to pay two dollars for their own compute, and make the process self-sustaining.