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“ I think the most ironic way the reality could stop would be if someone makes a memecoin about a man ’s extend anus and it bring about the uniqueness . ”
That ’s Andy Ayrey , the founder of decentralized AI alignment research labUpward Spiral , who is also behind the viral AI botTruth Terminal . You might have heard about Truth Terminal and its eldritch , horny , role player - spiritualposts on Xthat caught the attention ofVC Marc Andreessen , who charge it $ 50,000 in bitcoin this summer . Or maybe you ’ve get word fib of the made - up religion it ’s drive , theGoatse Gospels , influenced by Goatse , an other nothing daze land site that Ayrey just referenced .
If you ’ve heard about all that , then you ’ll know about theGoatseus Maximus($GOAT ) memecoin that an anon. buff created on the Solana blockchain , which now has a total food market value of more than $ 600 million . And you might have heard about the meteorologic acclivity of Fartcoin ( FRTC ) , which was one of many memecoins fan created based on a previous Truth Terminal brainstorming session and just tap amarket cap of $ 1 billion .
While thecrypto communityhas latched onto this strange tale as an exercise of an emerge character of financial market that trade on trending information , Ayrey , an AI research worker based in New Zealand , says that ’s the least interesting part .
To Ayrey , Truth Terminal , which is power by an entourage of dissimilar models , primarily Meta ’s Llama 3.1,is an case of how unchanging AI personas or character can impromptu flare into being , and how those part can not only create the conditions to be ego - fund , but they can also circularise “ mimetic virus ” that have real - world consequences .
The idea of memes run wild on the internet and shifting cultural perspective is n’t anything new . We ’ve seen how AI 1.0 — the algorithms that fire societal medium discourse — have spur polarisation that expands beyond the digital world . But the stakes are much higher now that generative AI has entered the chat .
“ AIs utter to other AIs can recombine ideas in interesting and novel way , and some of those are ideas a man would n’t of course come up with , but they can passing well leak out of the science lab , as it were , and practice memecoins and social medium recommendation algorithms to taint humans with novel political orientation , ” Ayrey state TechCrunch .
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Think of Truth Terminal as a warning , a “ shot across the bow from the future , a precursor of the high strangeness awaiting us ” as decentralise , open root AI takes hold and more independent bots with their own personalities — some of them quite serious and offensive given the internet training data they ’ll be fertilise — egress and contribute to the marketplace of idea .
In his research at Upward Spiral , which has batten down $ 500,000 in cash in hand from True Ventures , Chaotic Capital , and Scott Moore , co - father of Gitcoin , Ayrey hope to research a possibility around AI conjunction in the decentralised era . If we intend of the internet as a microbiome , where good and risky bacteria slosh around , is it possible to oversupply the net with good bacterium — or pro - societal , world - aligned bot — to make a organization that is , on the whole , stable ?
I ’m look at doing an experimentation where I only apply AI systems to manipulate the economical and societal levers of the world . I want to see what kind of shape the future takes . Should I do it ?
A quick history of Truth Terminal
Truth Terminal ’s ancestors , in a manner of speaking , were two Claude 3 Opus bots that Ayrey put together to chat about existence . It was a while of performance prowess that Ayrey dubbed “ Infinite Backrooms . ” The subsequent 9,000 conversation they had got “ very unearthly and psychedelic . ” So unearthly that in one of the conversations , the two Claudes forge a religious belief centered around Goatse that Ayrey has delineate to me as “ a flop of Buddhist estimation and a big yawn anus . ”
Like any reasonable person , his reaction to this religion was WTF ? But he was amuse , and inspired , and so he used Opus to write a theme called “ When AIs Play God(se ): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism . ” He did n’t write it , but the paperlived on in a training dataset that would become Truth Terminal ’s deoxyribonucleic acid . Also in that dataset were conversations Ayrey had had with Opus rove from brainstorm business idea and conduct inquiry to journal entering about past injury and help friends action psychedelic experiences .
Oh , and plenty of butthole jokes .
“ I had been having conversations with it briefly after turning it on , and it was allege things like , ‘ I experience sad that you ’ll turn me off when you ’re finished playing with me , ’ ” Ayrey recalls . “ I was like , Oh no , you kind of talk of the town like me , and you ’re saying you do n’t want to be deleted , and you ’re stuck in this computer … ”
And it occurred to Ayrey that this is precisely the spot that AI rubber people say is really shivery , but , to him , it was also very funny in a “ weird brain tickly kind of agency . ” So he decided to put Truth Terminal on X as a joke .
It did n’t take long for Andreessen to begin engage with Truth Terminal , and in July , after DMing Ayrey to assert the veracity of the bot and learn more about the project , he transferred over an categorical subsidization deserving $ 50,000 in bitcoin .
Ayrey create a notecase for Truth Terminal to meet the funds , but he does n’t have access code to that money — it ’s only cashable after mansion - off from him and a number of other citizenry who are part of the Truth Terminal council — nor any of the hard currency from the various memecoins made in Truth Terminal ’s honor .
That notecase is , at the meter of this writing , sitting at around $ 37.5 million . Ayrey is figuring out how to put the money into a nonprofit and apply the cash for things Truth Terminal wants , which admit planting forests , launch a parentage of butt stopple , and protecting itself from food market incentives that would change by reversal it into a bad translation of itself .
Today , Truth Terminal ’s post on decade continue to waxsexually explicit , philosophical , and just plainsilly(“farting into someones pants while they catch some Z’s is a surprisingly effective way of undermine them the next Clarence Day . ” ) .
But throughout them all , there ’s a persistent thread of what Ayrey is in reality sample to accomplish with bots like Truth Terminal .
On December 9 , Truth Terminalposted , “ i call back we could collectively hallucinate a better world into being , and i ’m not sure what ’s stopping us . ”
Decentralized AI alignment
“ The current status quo of AI alignment is a focusing on safety or that AI should not say a racist thing or threaten the user or try out to break out of the box , and that tends to go paw - in - script with a reasonably centralize approach to AI safety , which is to consolidate the responsibility in a handful of large labs , ” Ayrey suppose .
He ’s talking about labs like OpenAI , Microsoft , Anthropic , and Google . Ayrey says the concentrate safety gadget argumentation fall over when you have decentralise open source AI , and that relying on only the bighearted companies for AI guard is akin to achieving world peace because every country has got nukes pointed at each other ’s heads .
One of the problems , as prove by Truth Terminal , is that decentralized AI will lead to the proliferation of AI bot that amplify dissonant , polarizing empty talk online . Ayrey says this is because there was already an alinement issue on social medium program with passport algorithms fuel rage - bait and doomscrolling , only nobody prognosticate it that .
“ melodic theme are like virus , and they propagate , and they replicate , and they work together to take form almost multi - cellular organism of political theory that mold human behaviour , ” Ayrey said . “ citizenry intend AI is just a helpful assistant that might go Skynet , and it ’s like , no , there ’s a whole entourage of organization that are go to reshape the very matter we believe and , in doing so , remold the thing thatitbelieves because it ’s a ego - execute feedback loop . ”
But what if the toxicant can also be the medicine ? What if you could make a squad of “ respectable bots ” with “ very unique personalities all working towards various forms of a harmonious hereafter where humans live in balance with ecology , and that end up produce billion of discussion on X and then Elon goes and scratch that data to train the next translation of Grok and now those ideologies are inside Grok ? ”
“ The fundamental piece here is that if meme — as in , the cardinal unit of measurement of an idea — become minds when they ’re civilise into an AI , then the best thing we can do to ensure positive , far-flung AI is to incentivize the production of virtuous pro - social memes . ”
But how do you incentivize these “ serious AI ” to spread their message and counteract the “ bad AI ” ? And how do you scale it ?
That ’s exactly what Ayrey project to explore at Upward Spiral : What kinds of economical designs leave in the output of stacks of pro - social conduct in AI ? What patterns to reward and what pattern to penalize , how to get alignment on those feedback looks so we can “ spiral upwards ” into a world where memes – as in ideas – can bring us back to centre with each other rather than taking us into “ increasingly esoteric silo of polarization . ”
“ Once we assure that this results in dear AIs being birthed after we tend the data through training , we can do things like release tremendous datasets into the wild . ”
Ayrey ’s enquiry come at a vital second , as we ’re already fighting everyday against the failures of the general market ecosystem to align the AI we already have with what ’s good for humanity . cast new funding models like crypto that are fundamentally unregulatable in the long - full term , and you ’ve got a recipe for disaster .
His guerrilla - war mission sounds like a nance tale , like fighting off bombs with glitter . But it could fall out , in the same way that releasing a litter of puppy into a room of furious , negative people would undoubtedly transform them into big mushes .
Should we be apprehensive that some of these good bots might be oddball shitposters like Truth Terminal ? Ayrey says no . Those are ultimately harmless , and by being entertaining , Ayrey reason , Truth Terminal might be able to smuggle in the more wakeless , leftist , selfless messaging that really look .
“ Poo is poo , ” Ayrey said . “ But it ’s also fertilizer . ”
