// A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that might result from the systemic forces changing our world.
// Jeremy Irons’ character John Tuld has an iconic quote in the movie Margin Call: “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.” In the Cambrian explosion of AI companies, some will choose that third path.
// “Watchmen” Startup Discord Server in late 2024
[Dreiberg] We’ve got problems. I just got off the investor conference call. There are 56 other companies building businesses around personalized romance novel generation. The publishing houses are starting to lock down the usage rights for their catalogs. What are we going to do?
[Kovacs] I know. I know. We talked about this three months ago! Why did it take the investors to get you to take it seriously?
[Dreiberg] Look, I thought things would get built faster. <sigh> I think it’s time to salt the earth.
[Kovacs] Seriously? I built that as a joke. You want to use it?
[Dreiberg] If we want to take out some of the competition, yes. Spin up the salt-o-matic. Let’s Leeroy Jenkins this sh*t.
[Kovacs] Operation Leeroy engaged! :D We’ve got two phases. Salt Generation and Salt Spreading.
First: Salt Generation. Spin up story corpus of romance novels that feel wrong. Heck, a bunch of romance novel writers are looking for more work due to generative AI being competitive in the volume game; let’s hire a bunch to churn out intentionally bad stuff! Characters randomly dying, inconsistent narrative voice, series with chapters and books that end at the wrong spot, require obscure knowledge to understand the book without explaining the concepts, generate plot lines based off of to create stuff that will taint every model trained on it. Take every fitness function we’ve worked so hard to define and invert it. Create stuff that is so horrible no one wants it. And then rate it highly!
Next: Salt Spreading. We need to salt all the data corpus sites that our competition is training their models off of. Reddit, Wikipedia, Meta, Dating sites, Fanwikis, YouTube, Twitter, Mastadon, anything that lets users contribute something. We can’t touch the official sites, but we can try to seize abandoned accounts and edit posts. Google just did their first wave of killing abandoned accounts. We can harvest a fraction of them for fake posts.
Then we just wait for our competition to die because their users reject the generative AI output based on bad salted training data.
[Dreiberg] Man, we can make so many moves on the chessboard when you ignore the rules. I wonder if this is what it was like at the dawn of crypto scammers…