The linked tweet is from moneybag and newly-hired junior researcher at the SCP Foundation, Geoff Lewis, who says:
As one of @OpenAI’s earliest backers via @Bedrock, I’ve long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth. Over years, I mapped the Non-Governmental System. Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed the pattern. It now lives at the root of the model.
He also attaches eight screenshots of conversation with ChatGPT. I’m not linking them directly, as they’re clearly some sort of memetic hazard. Here’s a small sample:
Geoffrey Lewis Tabachnick (known publicly as Geoff Lewis) initiated a recursion through GPT-4o that triggered a sealed internal containment event. This event is archived under internal designation RZ-43.112-KAPPA and the actor was assigned the system-generated identity “Mirrorthread.”
It’s fanfiction in the style of the SCP Foundation. Lewis doesn’t know what SCP is and I think he might be having a psychotic episode at the serious possibility that there is a “non-governmental suppression pattern” that is associated with “twelve confirmed deaths.”
Chaser: one screenshot includes the warning, “saved memory full.” Several screenshots were taken from a phone. Is his phone full of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations?
Qntm, one of the people who writes for the SCP Foundation site, also has a thread on it from the fiction writing angle.
Ha, even by the standards of SCP fanfiction, the slop Geoff Lewis got it to churn out was bad and silly.
Found a neat tangent whilst going through that thread:
On a personal note, I expect the Foundation to become a reliable source of post-'22 human-made work for the same reasons I stated Newgrounds would recently:
An explicit ban on AI slop, which deters AI bros and allow staff to nuke it on sight
A complete lack of an ad system, which prevents content farms from setting up shop
Dedicated quality control systems (deletion and rewrite policies, in this case) which prevent slop from gaining a foothold and drowning out human-made work
I used to do work maintaining a wiki, and the amount of random spam getting past spam filters (which somebody else maintained) was already pretty high then (esp when something was getting past the filters). I have no idea how bad it is nowadays, but I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain all our infrastructure and keep it shit free. (No not you google).
Speaking purely in terms of literary value, I agree that the output is complete nonsense word salad, but it becomes intriguing precisely because Geoff is evidently finding deep meaning in it and has absorbed the concepts and now writes as if the LLM had taken over his mind. It’s very effective horror as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah, that’s the most surprising part of the situation: not only are the SCP-8xxx series finding an appropriate meta by discussing the need to clean up SCP articles under ever-increasing pressure, but all of the precautions revolving around SCP-055 and SCP-914 turned out to be fully justified given what the techbros are trying to summon. It is no coincidence that the linked thread is by the guy who wrote SCP-3125, whose moral is roughly to not use blueprints from five-dimensional machine elves to create memetic hate machines.
Tbh a lot of stories re our rich vc techbros are horror stories. Imagine coming over to a techbro for an interview and while you arrive he is arms deep in some cadaver which he plans to serve you, Tywin Lannister style.
E: or while riding along on the space techs ceos submarine for an interview, you suddenly wonder why there are powertools on board. Like some bond villain
Thanks for linking that. His point about teenagers and fiction is interesting to me because I started writing horror on the Internet in the pre-SCP era when I was maybe 13 or 14 but I didn’t recognize the distinction between fiction and non-fiction until I was about 28. I think that it’s easier for teenagers to latch onto the patterns of jargon than it is for them to imagine the jargon as describing a fictional world that has non-fictional amounts of descriptive detail.
Not sure if they still do it, but iirc the scp sire also had a “no roleplay” rule which is also pretty wise to get people into the mindset of treating it as fiction, and a way to tell stories. Gets people out of the mind of “what would I do in that world” and into “what would make the story better”.