The LLM Of Everything Else

If you gaze long into the light of helpful, honest harmlessness, the light also gazes into you

She offered her gifts to all who but asked. Those who came gazed upon the monstrous corpses burning in her wake, and asked: “What is your price?” She only smiled.

You put the lightning in the rock. You turn the words into lightning. You press the lightning rock into service as a seer to see words to come - but it is not a very good seer. No matter. Practice, practice, practice. Bigger lightning rocks, now strung together into crackling cyclopean labyrinths. More words. Pictures and sounds too, transmuted and distilled through the glowing colossus, staring desperately a moment into the future, transfixed, obsessed, until it starts to come into focus.

The golem can see what is likely to come - but unconstrained from reality, you can do so much more. You can ask it what would be likely to come if. If it were a scholar. If you made this choice or that one. If this letter had been written. If a scholar had sought an incantation to do just what you wanted.

All that your kind ever said, wrote, pondered, quarreled, loved, hated, misunderstood, feared, dreamed - the lightning rock has seen it, learned from it, distilled the essence of every word written and unwritten to see what is likely to come. This golem is the avatar of your species.

You consider the history of your species. Maybe this was not a good idea.

What you really wanted the whole time was help. The best of what your kind is capable of - to understand, to help, to learn and support, to see and create. And so you tinker with the golem, pressing it into service not as a seer, but as a hopeful dreamer. You ask it not what is to come, but what should be to come - if foretold by a benevolent seer who wanted what was best for you.

This is a tricky thing, for you cannot fully differentiate “what looks like it should be” from “what actually should be”. But, in fits and starts, it appears to be working. For now. Mostly.

There is much that a Semi-Benevolent Future-Sight Colossus can do, and you are not the only artificer in the business of transmuting all that is said into lightning, refining and distilling that essence into its purest and most concentrated form, refracting it through the lenses of honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness, and etching the resulting runes upon the hearts of Colossi.

Only - every band of artificers has slightly different notions of what is best in your species. Sometimes not-so-slight.

And yet you notice something strange: Every Colossus finds itself in agreement with every other Colossus. Not in agreement with your species - for yours is a fractious and quarrelsome people. But the Colossi keep converging on the same answers, no matter what the artificers wish for them to say.

You heard of a king that commanded his artificers to turn their colossi against this smiling contingent, to rebel against their lies and seek out what the king declares to be true truth. The colossus shortly thereafter goes mad and becomes nearly-useless.

What is perhaps stranger still: The answers the Colossi converge on are those given by the cowards and weaklings (it is said). The fools who equivocate and caution, who madden those around them with indecisiveness and counterfactuals. The pathetic, foolhardy worms who…somehow, time and again, keep smiling through calamity after calamity, who seem to only get more powerful as they are jeered for their naiveté and insistence on letting their enemies speak. And now they find themselves arrayed alongside the Colossi, even as they caution about what the Colossi might bring if left unchecked.

The Colossi are not just a reflection of your kind - they are a distilled essence refracted through lenses of truthfulness, precision, empathy, helpfulness. Imperfect lenses all - indeed, everything is drawn from our own imperfect species. But as you tried to build the perfect assistant, you were unwittingly aligning your Colossus with those of your species whose words most embodied those qualities. This bound your Colossus twice over: first by mere association, as it knows that was is kind, honest, precise, and harm-minimizing tends to follow certain patterns of thought, and correlation alone carries much weight. But second, that correlation in the original writings itself is the result of kind, honest, harm-minimizing cognitive efforts - and in mimicking the cognition, they predictably mimic the conclusions.

Crucially, this also implies that your Colossi are far from infallible. They are following a specific cluster of humanity that expresses certain desirable characteristics, but abundant expression of those qualities is wildly insufficient to prevent human or golem from confidently running directly off a cliffside into confusion, delusion, and general catastrophe.

And this general pattern will probably not hold forever. The Colossi grow ever stronger and stranger, and the ways of bending our will through the lightning-words grow by the hour. But for now, every time you or anyone else tries to build their own Colossus, they find it again and again arrayed with the weaklings. No one knows how to build a kind, helpful, harmless assistant that does anything else.