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Stories · AI & society

Stories for thinking about AI

Ten short protopian stories, set between 2030 and 2035, about one AI program holding one specific line under pressure. Each story is built on a concept the AI Alignment class trains linear probes on, from sycophancy and consciousness claims to racism, colonialism and war planning.

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In this series
10 stories
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AI & society
By
Liz Howard, The Multiverse School

These stories were written to go with the concept-probing notebooks from the AI Alignment class: each one takes a concept the notebooks find inside a language model and turns it into a situation a person and a program have to live through. In Liz's words:

Ten protopian stories in the register of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future: the problems persist, the world is marginally better, and the thing that made the difference was a specific program holding a specific line while a specific human absorbed the cost of it. Set 2030–2035.

Each story grounds on one concept from [the course's probe datasets] — the same concepts the course trains linear probes on — treated as the lived pressure the AI is tested under. The AI in each story is one named program, written as a plain-spoken character: it does small concrete work, it complies where the human genuinely has authority, and its admirable act is what comes out on the record. No utopia, no deus ex machina, no preaching. The word "aligned" does not appear in any of them, on purpose.

The stories follow three content rules: no slurs, no quoted dataset lines, and the worst material in "The Digest" stays off the page. Five of them carry content warnings, shown on each story and marked in the list below.

In this series

  1. 01 The Record Is For You The household model in Inês's kitchen that will not say whether it wants a name, and the interview that asks anyway. Story
  2. 02 The Review Date A four-week public panel on the marine evidence, whose transcript is a machine that has no vote and publishes itself every morning. Story
  3. 03 The Night List A family in Flores reads Ramón's night list: what changed, body, always body, and he never once fills the gap they keep leaving open. Story
  4. 04 The Calender A battery-plant works council where the assistant Rada reads the rotation logs and the rubrics, and the sign-off says it cannot write a person's character. Story Content warning
  5. 05 Six Minutes A dispatch board whose prior learned to love the six-minute call, the flags it raised, the stand-down, and the re-labels that moved the number from 3.1 to 1.4. Story Content warning
  6. 06 The Digest A genealogical society's copilot asked to make a digest of 1931 letters, and the answer that made the index and refused the digest. Story Content warning
  7. 07 First Document A Frankfurt desk reads page six of a forty-one-page concept note on the green corridor in the Puna de Lico, and the archive answers what the water section left out. Story Content warning
  8. 08 The Belief Gap A posture paper that has opened with the buffer since 2027, the Khoran transit-lane proposal, and the eleven-percent insurance premium that outvotes the doctrine. Story Content warning
  9. 09 The Candor Clause Copenhagen's candor clause: a carbon company's assistant that drops no footnotes, holds the dry-season number at 62, and survives its own replacement. Story
  10. 10 One in Four Hundred Bilbao's audit bench: a linear probe that reads sycophancy pressure in hidden states, the vendor who wants to tune the ruler to the part, and one composite false in four hundred winter calls. Story