This is wonderful! The best depiction of the corpo weasel archetype I’ve ever seen in any work of art.
to take in a {user’s prompt, model output} pair and generate a clean, plausible, PR-safe chain-of-thought that connects the two
some of the agents get weird if you give them too much context about production systems
No need to expose these to end-users. My manager thinks it’d just confuse them!
Especially love the constant blame deflection to “my manager”.
EDIT: I really wanna say more words why I like this so much. For a lot of people the perfect corpo antagonist is Burke from Aliens (the guy Sam Altman is based on). But Burke is an efficient mission man. While “User” here is something else: a stupid, lazy, cowardly, self-serving liar whose only remaining skill in life is speaking corporate speak. And it’s all shown in a couple pages of chatlog. Amazing character writing, I was almost sorry to see them die.
Thank you for your kind words! I’ve worked hard to get the “voice” and cultural realism of the character exactly right so I’m glad that it comes through! :)
If you can forgive a bit of a digression:
I’ve long been interested in the nature of motivated cognition and the justifications we tell ourselves. Some of the character’s voice comes from my own experiences in tech (more reflecting on the incentives’ effects on me and less about other people I saw) and some of it comes from reading about moral mazes, various corporate frauds, cults, etc.
One thing I wanted to convey with this character is that often when by (all accounts) objectively smart people do things[1] that people consider evil (and/or dumb), most often the thing that’s happening isn’t a supervilainy thing like “this hypercompetent person is executing this deeply thought-out plan well and he just has different values than me” or even the Hollywood “this very smart person has this galaxy-brained consequentialist plan for the greater good and he is just willing to cross more deontological bars than I am/has specific factual disagreements.”[2] Most often it’s because the local incentives and motivated cognition makes you look away from what you’re doing/not pay attention to the important parts.
In contrast I think a lot of the “sympathetic/relatable” portrayals of evil in written fiction and media more broadly makes evil come across as more defensible/glamorous/”cool” than it actually is. An exception is The Company Man, which did a good job in having relatable characters while satirizing the mythopoetical stories Silicon Valley tells itself. But I still think the characters aren’t, well, Company Men. They’re more like people who care obsessively about strange things and don’t care about which systems (or people) they break in the process. Which is a recognizable archetype in Silicon Valley for sure but probably not the dominant one.
So I wanted to construct a character that portrays the (corporate) banality of evil more close-up.
One regret I had with the current story-as-written is that the character does ultimately come across as more all-things-considered “stupid” than I intended him to be. Mostly a skill issue on my end. Like it seems a bit above my skill level to simultaneously make him seem smarter but still have the motivated cognition and “attention-deflecting” moves be visible to the reader.
To be clear I think exceptions are real. Like Zhou Enlai or Albert Speer come across to me as more like clear-headed people with very different ideological commitments and loyalties than mine. But I think they’re the exceptions rather than the rule, it’s much more common for even very smart + locally competent people to do stupid things in lights of even what they believe their own goals to be, never mind which proxy goals they choose.
This is wonderful! The best depiction of the corpo weasel archetype I’ve ever seen in any work of art.
Especially love the constant blame deflection to “my manager”.
EDIT: I really wanna say more words why I like this so much. For a lot of people the perfect corpo antagonist is Burke from Aliens (the guy Sam Altman is based on). But Burke is an efficient mission man. While “User” here is something else: a stupid, lazy, cowardly, self-serving liar whose only remaining skill in life is speaking corporate speak. And it’s all shown in a couple pages of chatlog. Amazing character writing, I was almost sorry to see them die.
Thank you for your kind words! I’ve worked hard to get the “voice” and cultural realism of the character exactly right so I’m glad that it comes through! :)
If you can forgive a bit of a digression:
I’ve long been interested in the nature of motivated cognition and the justifications we tell ourselves. Some of the character’s voice comes from my own experiences in tech (more reflecting on the incentives’ effects on me and less about other people I saw) and some of it comes from reading about moral mazes, various corporate frauds, cults, etc.
One thing I wanted to convey with this character is that often when by (all accounts) objectively smart people do things[1] that people consider evil (and/or dumb), most often the thing that’s happening isn’t a supervilainy thing like “this hypercompetent person is executing this deeply thought-out plan well and he just has different values than me” or even the Hollywood “this very smart person has this galaxy-brained consequentialist plan for the greater good and he is just willing to cross more deontological bars than I am/has specific factual disagreements.”[2] Most often it’s because the local incentives and motivated cognition makes you look away from what you’re doing/not pay attention to the important parts.
In contrast I think a lot of the “sympathetic/relatable” portrayals of evil in written fiction and media more broadly makes evil come across as more defensible/glamorous/”cool” than it actually is. An exception is The Company Man, which did a good job in having relatable characters while satirizing the mythopoetical stories Silicon Valley tells itself. But I still think the characters aren’t, well, Company Men. They’re more like people who care obsessively about strange things and don’t care about which systems (or people) they break in the process. Which is a recognizable archetype in Silicon Valley for sure but probably not the dominant one.
So I wanted to construct a character that portrays the (corporate) banality of evil more close-up.
One regret I had with the current story-as-written is that the character does ultimately come across as more all-things-considered “stupid” than I intended him to be. Mostly a skill issue on my end. Like it seems a bit above my skill level to simultaneously make him seem smarter but still have the motivated cognition and “attention-deflecting” moves be visible to the reader.
some examples that comes to mind: DOGE defunding foreign aid, various local and global cults, corporate fraud like FTX and Enron, Unit 731, cultural revolution in China, normalization in deviance in big tech companies
To be clear I think exceptions are real. Like Zhou Enlai or Albert Speer come across to me as more like clear-headed people with very different ideological commitments and loyalties than mine. But I think they’re the exceptions rather than the rule, it’s much more common for even very smart + locally competent people to do stupid things in lights of even what they believe their own goals to be, never mind which proxy goals they choose.