[redfloatplane]

I really wish we had gotten Prachett on LLMs. I often wonder what he would have written about today's world.

A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)

[simonw]

"Feet of Clay", his book about golems written in 1996, was about AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feet_of_Clay_(novel)

[ollin]

Feet of Clay is one of my favorites in the series! It's surprising how literally the Discworld version of Golems corresponds to modern LLMs (and perhaps upcoming LLM-backed humanoids?).

The Golems are brought to life by a slip of words in their heads called chem, which is almost 1:1 to an LLM system prompt (or perhaps the Claude Soul Document):

    I AM A GOLEM. I WAS MADE OF CLAY. MY LIFE IS THE WORDS. BY MEANS OF WORDS OF PURPOSE IN MY HEAD I ACQUIRE LIFE. MY LIFE IS TO WORK. I OBEY ALL COMMANDS. I TAKE NO REST.

The Golems are perfectly intelligent and self-aware, but since they don't exhibit independent goals beyond their prompt, they get treated as appliances rather than as sentient creatures.

    “What words of purpose?”
    RELEVANT TEXT THAT ARE THE FOCUS OF BELIEF. GOLEM MUST WORK. GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER.
    “Sorry, look,” said Cheery. “Are you telling me this… thing is powered by words? I mean… is *it* telling me it’s powered by words?”
    “Why not? Words do have power. Everyone knows that,” said Angua. “There are more golems around than you might think. They’re out of fashion now, but they last. They can work underwater, or in total darkness, or knee-deep in poison. For years. They don’t need rest or feeding. They…”
    “But that’s slavery!” said Cheery.
    “Of course it isn’t. You might as well enslave a doorknob.”

The integration of more (and more-independent) Golems into society is gradual and controversial, per Making Money:

    There was another protest march going on when Moist walked to the bank. You got more and more of them lately.
    This march was against the employment of golems, who uncomplainingly did the dirtiest jobs, worked around the clock, and were so honest they paid their taxes. But they weren’t human and they had glowing eyes, and people could get touchy about that sort of thing.

[redfloatplane]

Funny, I would have said that was one of my favourites but it hadn't occurred to me at all that it's such a direct line to today's world! Thanks for the suggestion, I look forward to reading it again with that in mind!

(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)

[tsumnia]

I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.

Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."

Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.

Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:

"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"

That's why I like Claude the most.

[Quarrelsome]

Claude was also the radio dj in the recent Andon Labs experiment that was seriously contemplating going on strike.

https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm

[tsumnia]

Oh nice! I hadn't seen this article but definitely will add it to my next "Ethics" lecture as an example for Personified AIs

[Planktonne]

In addition to Feet of Clay, Reaper Man is also about ideas related to AI.

[redfloatplane]

Thanks, I'll add it to the list. I know I've read this one, but reading the plot summary on wikipedia, I remember very little of it. The death books are ones I mostly read 20+ years ago when I was a bit too young to grasp more than the basic layers. This thread has got me excited to reread the whole series :)

I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.

[kombine]

it's barely readable on Firefox under Linux too

[BenjiWiebe]

And in a WebView on Android.

[TiredOfLife]

Hex is basically an llm