Discussion
An experiment in orchestrating multiple AI personas.
One of the things I like about AI is its potential for strangeness. Sometimes I miss the image generators of a couple of years ago that would always get the hands wrong and sometimes give people disturbing extra teeth and so on; the mistakes were a source of a lot of humor and delight for me.
The underlying mechanisms for how LLMs organize and group tokens also just fascinate me: those vast vectors of largely indecipherable meaning-numbers that somehow capture more-or-less correct concepts about so many different things. In fact, they fascinate me enough that I built a ... widget, I guess (it's too useless to be called a tool) a while back to move through the space containing the GloVe word vectors.
It was called Rainbow Zero and is still available if you want to try it out.
It uses the 50-dimension vectors which I completely unceremoniously and arbitrarily chopped down to 25-dimensions because I didn't have either the time or energy to really optimize searching through the vectors as you moved around. There really isn't a graspable concept of a 25-dimensional space, so moving is a little strange: you need to first "turn to face" a word, and then you can "move towards" it.
Anyway, all of that is actually just a rambling digression. The point is: I like it when AI comes up with strange, weird things rather than trying to steer it too strongly towards "the outcome I want". Towards this end, one of the first things I experimented with via the Claude developer console was setting up a system prompt that encouraged responses that highlighted subtle or strange connections between ideas and a second that asked questions related to the text it was given.
Then I would send a message to the first system (named "Ismere" so I could keep track of it), get a list of strange ideas related to whatever I had said, and feed those into the second system ("Nico"). Nico would come up with a couple of questions, I'd pick one, and give it to Ismere. This produced, among other things, the very satisfying idea of "Thursbert", which is, of course, Thursday's angsty cousin.
Fast forward a bit and we get to the current version of this project, which I am foolishly calling "Discussion" because I am burned out on naming AI projects. (A downside of how quickly you can generate code with AI; as if naming things wasn't hard enough at a human pace.)
Discussion is a browser-based tool that allows you to configure various AI participants (which are really just various system prompts with fun names), mark one of them as the "orchestrator", and then ask it to produce... something. I've been using it to produce short stories.
I'm not aiming to generate stories that feel particularly human-written though; instead I'm tinkering with various participants to try and find combinations that generate stories that really highlight that AI strangeness that I like so much.
Under the hood there's nothing enormously fancy going on here: human input always gets handed to the participant marked as the orchestrator and it has access to the other participants as tools (part of defining the participants is providing information about when they should be consulted). The orchestrator thinks a bit, then asks various other participants for their input – often a couple of times – and synthesizes it into the final output.
Since I built this with short stories in mind there's also a tool the orchestrator can use to store completed chapters as it goes; those can then be downloaded individually or as a combined story. A bit of "frontmatter" is also generated that includes some details about the participants in the conversation and records the human prompt that was entered to kick things off.
The results are ... interesting, so far. They aren't as weird and off-the-wall as I would like, but they do sometimes include some interesting surreal details. I'll leave you with a piece that was "written" by Joran, Ismere, Nico, Daisy, and Grundunk (Grundunk is big on action scenes; it helps the pacing) in response to the prompt: Please write a very short story (perhaps 1,000 words) about a cook named Basu who is very stressed.
Okay, here we go. I'm going to put the AI written text in purple; that feels right.
Basu had been a cook for eleven years, and in eleven years he had never once heard the ticket printer make a sound like that — a long, wet, shriek, like a fax machine giving birth. He tore off the ticket anyway. Table 4: one grief, lightly seared, hold the onions.
He called it back to Nadia. "Heard, on it," she said. Neither of them had ever once said no to an order.
It was Friday. It was always Friday, lately, in the sense that all his days had begun sliding into each other like plates in a bus tub. The clock above the pass had taken to showing two times at once — 8:47 racing forward, 8:41 dawdling behind it, like it couldn't decide how frightened to be on his behalf. He didn't have time to ask it.
"Basu, WHERE is twelve," said Chef, not really a question.
"Coming," Basu said. It wasn't true yet. It would be soon.
He reached for the salt and it came up soft under his fingers, unwilling. He tasted a pinch off his thumb. It tasted like Tuesday. He used it anyway. Nobody had complained yet about how Tuesday-flavored the branzino was.
The walk-in door was fogged on the inside, like it was breathing. He put his hand flat on the steel and felt it rise, just slightly, under his palm, and thought: yeah. Fair enough. Same.
Above pan four, steam gathered itself into the shape of a small dog, sat, wagged once, and dissolved. Basu had had a dog once, a small stupid dog named Biscuit who died the same month he got his first sous chef job, and he had not thought about Biscuit in maybe four years, and now here was Biscuit made of vapor, evaporating over the scallops.
"Basu!" Chef again. "Twelve!"
"Coming," Basu said, to the dog, to Chef, to the salt, to whoever was collecting these promises.
His knife had gotten heavier — not steel-heavy, guilt-heavy. By the time he broke down the chicken thighs for twelve it felt like lifting a phone book he owed someone an apology for. His mother. Biscuit. Nadia, probably, for the thing in 2019 he never quite apologized for.
That was when pan six caught.
It went up fast and orange and pleased with itself, the way grease fires always seem faintly delighted to finally get their moment. Basu's first instinct, the wrong one, was to grab a glass of water sitting by the pass, and his hand was three inches from it before some deeper, better-trained animal in him screamed no, and he pivoted instead and slammed the lid down over pan six, hard, both hands, like tucking in a very bad child.
The fire went out. It went out completely and a little sulkily, like it had wanted to be seen more than it wanted to actually burn anything down.
The kitchen went silent. Even the ticket printer stopped its shrieking. The clock, for one second, showed only one time, 8:52, agreeing with itself for what might have been the first time all night.
Nadia started clapping. Slow, then fast. Chef looked at Basu, looked at the lid, looked at Basu again, and did not yell, which was its own kind of miracle.
"Table twelve," Basu said, holding up the ticket, hand shaking only a little now. "I got twelve."
Someone laughed — he thought it was the dishwasher, Miguel, who rarely laughed at anything that wasn't a video on his phone — and then everyone was laughing, the good, ugly, relieved kind of laughing that only happens after everyone was fairly sure, for about four seconds, that the building might burn down.
Basu looked up. The steam over pan four was just steam again. The salt, when he checked it out of curiosity, tasted like salt. The clock kept one time now, unremarkable about it, like it had never had a problem in its life.
He plated table twelve. He plated table four — one grief, lightly seared, hold the onions — and it went out looking, as far as he could tell, exactly like the branzino next to it, and nobody sent it back. Much later, closing out, he found himself hoping, in a specific and embarrassing way, that whoever ordered it had liked it.
"You good?" Nadia asked, mopping down the line.
"Yeah," Basu said. For the first time all night, it wasn't a promise to the future. It was just true. Behind her, Miguel was humming something tuneless over the dish pit, and Chef was writing tomorrow's prep list like nothing at all had happened, and the walk-in door had stopped fogging, mostly, though Basu didn't check too closely.
