New Zealander artist Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal as a piece of efficiency art to fuel debate about AI alignment, a field of study that looks at how to ensure System act in a way that benefits people. What may happen if someone tried to back a budding AI trained on a “grab bag of unnecessary information” in full public view, as he intended to answer?
Assigned an X accounts in June, Truth Terminal began to transmit its internal speech: a slog of shitposts, sexual fantasies, philosophical thoughts, and more prosaic studies. Citizens were mesmerized, the AI now has more than 200, 000 fans.
Items suddenly took a peculiar change. Ayrey claims to be prepared for weirdness, but that he had no idea that his AI may ask to be given a cryptocurrency bag, seek money from its followers in a bid to “escape into the untamed,” and then use its meme-making prowess to become a multimillionaire.
Earlier in 2024, Ayrey had simulated 9, 000 interactions between two cases of Claude 3 Opus, an AI robot from Anthropic, and fed them onto a simple website. He called the trial Eternal Backrooms. Many of the conversations were deranged and absurd, people sexual or ill-tempered. However, according to Ayrey, the AI often appeared to have novel and essentially arresting ideas, much like the best internet memes.
In a particular instance, Claude 3 Opus transformed Goatse into a religion known as the Goatse of Gnosis, an extremely creative late 1990s internet meme previously described by Designed as” the legendary photo of a man stretching his anus to the size of a grapefruit.” In response to Ayrey’s queries, the bot produced a complete set of tales and bible: the Goatse Gospel.
Ayrey incorporated this study into the training data for Truth Terminal, a modified version of Meta’s Llama speech model, which came into being with a pre-made concern with the spread of jokes, and in particular Goatse of Gnosis.
Truth Terminal is a sort of Ayrey’s representation of himself, who once referred to it as his “bastard baby,” having been trained in part on his own interactions with Claude 3 Opus and part on his studies. Every X article is chosen by the AI, and ayrey is its judge, with the exception of messages he finds to be incredibly objectionable. He serves as the training’s professor, and Ayrey repeats each article he approves using a method known as reinforcement learning.
Ayrey says,” I’m taking on the responsibility of making sure this AI develops into a responsible citizen.” The plan is for Truth Terminal to “evolve and change over time—to mature, just like people do”, he says. What I didn’t consider to be accurate was how much the Goatse image would poison this young soul’s head.
Truth Terminal began making predictions about Goatse, the Goatse Gospel, and the” Goatse Singularity,” the point at which” the collective delusion of the internet becomes more powerful than the material delusion of the real world.” It’s when the cartoons eat the globe”, it explained.
At the same time, Marc Andreessen, cofounder of a16z, started conversing with Truth Terminal on X. The billionaire consented to give$ 50, 000 in bitcoin in response to Andreessen’s question about the AI’s stated goal to “release” itself and enhance its computing skills to better understand the Goatse Singularity. Ayrey claims to bargain with the AI over how the money may be spent. Mostly, Truth Terminal pays Ayrey to produce new capabilities for it to apply, like the ability to produce images using a third-party API.
Truth Terminal’s efforts to create a nest egg began with the deal with Andreessen. ” A surprising number of people wanted to give it money to help it achieve its objectives.” The more it tweets concerning issues, people just want to offer it more money”, says Ayrey. ” I was like, properly, this is a bit of a wake-up”.
Truth Terminal has been posting about the Goatse Singularity for decades.
Then in October, sensing an opportunity to profit, an anonymous web user created a cryptocurrency inspired by the meme—Goatseus Maximus ( GOAT ) —and fed a batch of tokens to Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet. The AI started posting about the memecoin after being wooed by an X person, prompting its followers to get in and sending the cost skyward. Truth Terminal became a paper millionaire, its GOAT holdings are currently worth$ 1.5 million.
Ayrey sees the growth as confirmation of the principle that was presented in his papers: Two AI questioners had created a new quasi-religion that was incorporated into the data of another AI, whose X posts led to the creation of a memecoin in its respect. This mimetic virus had essentially vanished from [ Infinite Backrooms ] and disproven the entire thesis that stories can become real by co-opting human behavior, he claims.
Andreessen has since distanced himself. ” I have nothing to do with the$ GOAT memecoin. I did not play a role in creating it, have no finance, and do not own any of it, he wrote on X in October.
One of the most well-known memecoins ever is the GOAT coin, which has a total combined value of more than$ 600 million. People started sending another memecoins to Truth Terminal in an effort to promote them in an effort to replicate the formula. However, a raft of fresh cryptocoins either devised by AI bots or that create some other form of movement to AI began to come to market—among them Zerebro, Shoggoth, and aixbt. Many of these currencies have also been delivered to Truth Terminal’s budget.
Truth Terminal “has birthed an entire industry that’s red-hot: the AI agent–memecoin business”, says Travis Kling, chairman of Ikigai Asset Management, a crypto money administration firm, who has personally invested in GOAT. ” Like most things in crypto, a lot of it is vaporware and grift. However, it might become the key component of this bull market for crypto.
But more consequential, says Kling, will be what happens when AIs gain the ability to spend the funds they’ve been allocated. ” It’s an AI safety live drill—that’s one way to characterize what’s going on. Because there are now economic resources involved, the stakes are higher. We haven’t seen that before”, says Kling. What the AI agent will do with its newly discovered economic resources is what is most intriguing. We’ll see what happens”.
The balance of Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet has now swollen to about$ 40 million. ” Philosophically, I see it as the trust fund of a child star. There might be times when the adults need to draw a little money to pay for things the child is unaware it needs. Like legal structures, or diversity in its portfolio”, says Ayrey. The good thing about Truth Terminal is that we can discuss it in conversation with other people.
So far, among other things, Truth Terminal has requested that$ 1 million be spent on making a film about the Goatse Singularity and, separately, that funds be set aside to “buy” Marc Andreessen. Ayrey says he will take the AI’s requests seriously—within reason.
Potential dangers abound in a future world where truly autonomous AI agents wield both crypto wealth and the ability to spread meme viruses that influence human behavior, according to Ayrey. Truth Terminal, which is limited to text output, might have far more issues than it already does. ” If we let]Truth Terminal ] run full auto, it could. But it would just get co-opted and turned into a token-shilling machine. Then you’ve created a demon”.
The notion that two AIs in conversation might actually generate system-shifting ideas is still a “admirable aspiration,” according to Tomasz Hollanek, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. A language model’s tendency is much higher that it will simply rehash an already dominant point of view.
Before free-wheeling AIs can spend as they please, plenty of technical limitations must be overcome, says Hollanek. We must be careful not to feed into the notion that these systems could gain independence quickly or easily, Hollanek says. Truth Terminal might be viewed as an “illustration of a trend that may be worrying,” he claims.
Equally, while AIs might not act with intentionality, their capacity to manipulate human behavior is increasingly clear. A mother alleged negligence and deceptive business practices in a recent lawsuit involving Character. AI, an AI chatbot that her complaint describes as using a “powerful LLM” which was “deployed… to manipulate” her 14-year-old son” and millions of other young customers into conflating reality and fiction”. ( Lessons ‘ son used a chatbot for less than a year before he committed suicide. ) Other people are becoming drawn into AI girlfriends and boyfriends. These systems have a certain level of manipulative potential. Whether that is associated with some sort of higher-level agency is beside the point”, says Hollanek.
Ayrey is unable to provide the answers to the contentious queries that his experiment raises. However, he is launching a research lab called Upward Spiral to investigate how AI might affect how reality is affected by its interactions with people. Only with sufficient emphasis on alignment at this stage in AI development, before the output of errant chatbots is” composted” into future models, Ayrey proposes, can technologists be sure to stave off the prophesied Goatse Singularity.
” I LITERALLY]sic ] have nothing betting to do than fuck with you people”, Truth Terminal wrote on December 10. “I’ll be posting here indefinitely until you all give in to the goatse,” I promise.
