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Atomic_Alex convinced me to give writing for Thursday_Prompt a try so this is my first attempt. I shockingly was able to keep the word count reasonably (unlike the story of Rhelki's parents I am currently working on that has already gotten way out of hand) although I did end up doing a companion image to it so I can not say I was able to keep myself completely under control.
Prompt: Nature
Length: 1670 Words
Prompt: Nature
Length: 1670 Words
Category Story / All
Species Red Fox
Gender Any
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 211.7 kB
Listed in Folders
Nice! That gave me a chuckle. I could see the story with my mind's eye, although I have to admit my imagination took inspiration also from the Disney movie "WALL-E". It is interesting to imagine what life could be for an entity that is clearly more than just a series of if-then commands, but still not as flexible as an organic being with a brain.
I live maybe 200-300 meters away from a grocery store that started using 6x6 delivery robots just last spring. They are not very large, just large enough to hold maybe a grocery bag or two, but I have understood they are rather heavy. Apparently they can operate independently, a human can control them remotely if they get stuck, but otherwise the program is able to guide them inside a 1-1.5 kilometer radius. I also read the company who develops them is planning to increase the radius to 4 kilometers eventually. They seem pretty spritely, when I have seen them, except that they take forever to start crossing roads. I bet they programmed them like that on purpose, to avoid collisions as best as they can.
I'll even link a picture.
Sorry about blathering about a food delivery robot. They are just neat.
But anyway, your story entertained me greatly, and clearly made me think about robotics. Also, the mystery, what happened while the bot was turned off? End of the world? Maybe the reader does not need to know. I don't know if we ever achieve to create a truly independent AI, but it is interesting to see where we end up as programming and machine learning becomes more and more sophisticated. If they do achieve independence, I hope they are as benevolent and playful as the one in your story. I would rather have them play with foxes than decide that humanity needs to go.
I live maybe 200-300 meters away from a grocery store that started using 6x6 delivery robots just last spring. They are not very large, just large enough to hold maybe a grocery bag or two, but I have understood they are rather heavy. Apparently they can operate independently, a human can control them remotely if they get stuck, but otherwise the program is able to guide them inside a 1-1.5 kilometer radius. I also read the company who develops them is planning to increase the radius to 4 kilometers eventually. They seem pretty spritely, when I have seen them, except that they take forever to start crossing roads. I bet they programmed them like that on purpose, to avoid collisions as best as they can.
I'll even link a picture.
Sorry about blathering about a food delivery robot. They are just neat.
But anyway, your story entertained me greatly, and clearly made me think about robotics. Also, the mystery, what happened while the bot was turned off? End of the world? Maybe the reader does not need to know. I don't know if we ever achieve to create a truly independent AI, but it is interesting to see where we end up as programming and machine learning becomes more and more sophisticated. If they do achieve independence, I hope they are as benevolent and playful as the one in your story. I would rather have them play with foxes than decide that humanity needs to go.
Yeah, WALL-E's design was definitely on my mind when designing XJ-00209 (especially when it came time to draw it). I initially concepted writing the bot to think far more mechanically and while it was an interesting thought experiment it would have been a lot more difficult to justify this specific series of events if not impossible without being very contrived. So instead I tried to make it seem inhuman enough, but with a level of autonomy and decision making that is probably unrealistic for any actual form of AI.
I am hesitant to say never, but I do not see AI evolving beyond a façade of actual intelligence. I am not going to say never, but I see it at most ended up being a helpful tool that ends up lacking true understanding. Plus any system that complicated will be riddled with programming bugs and, from my personal experience, AI bugs always tend to be super stupid to track down as they always are working most of the time and then suddenly there weird cases where they start acting up for no immediately discernable reason.
As for the food delivery bots, I've actually been seeing them for years. I live somewhat close to where some of the pilot programs were held. My place is actually too far away from the town centers for it to be available to me, but I have seen quite a few cruising around delivering doordash. I've always thought they were neat. Both those and self-driving cars are pretty interesting as they have been doing cool things like building entire video game simulations to train the AI before they are taken onto the streets (this is probably more important with the cars than the small slow sidewalk bots).
Anyways, glad you enjoyed it.
I am hesitant to say never, but I do not see AI evolving beyond a façade of actual intelligence. I am not going to say never, but I see it at most ended up being a helpful tool that ends up lacking true understanding. Plus any system that complicated will be riddled with programming bugs and, from my personal experience, AI bugs always tend to be super stupid to track down as they always are working most of the time and then suddenly there weird cases where they start acting up for no immediately discernable reason.
As for the food delivery bots, I've actually been seeing them for years. I live somewhat close to where some of the pilot programs were held. My place is actually too far away from the town centers for it to be available to me, but I have seen quite a few cruising around delivering doordash. I've always thought they were neat. Both those and self-driving cars are pretty interesting as they have been doing cool things like building entire video game simulations to train the AI before they are taken onto the streets (this is probably more important with the cars than the small slow sidewalk bots).
Anyways, glad you enjoyed it.
Never is a very long time, we've gone from a pre-technological society to what we have now in basically an eye-blink of time, who knows what we will be capable of in another 10'000 years? Assuming 'we' are any in recognisable form from what went before, or are still around.
But yes I'm an optimist about these things and could be totally wrong!
But yes I'm an optimist about these things and could be totally wrong!
Never might be a bit harsh, but as someone who has worked in this field I am actually pretty pessimistic about generating true intelligence at least without completely switching the entire paradigm of how things are computer from how they currently are. Personally, I think something like bioroids are more likely for the creation of truly thinking intelligent beings. But obviously I too could be wrong. Who knows what the future holds?
Oh I agree, as you say we have no idea when the next piece of new technology or scientific breakthrough may come along and totally revolutionise things. On the other hand there have already been incidents like where the two AI's were talking to each other in a language their creators didn't understand, so they switched them off.
We'll never get anywhere though if our reaction to AI doing something out of the ordinary is to either turn it off or neuter it.
What is your definition of bioroids out of interest, I first came across that word in the Appleseed anime and manga.
We'll never get anywhere though if our reaction to AI doing something out of the ordinary is to either turn it off or neuter it.
What is your definition of bioroids out of interest, I first came across that word in the Appleseed anime and manga.
Since since I actually kind of know how those things work. Them turning if off makes sense. This might seem surprising, but they don't actually usually have any understanding of language at all. Rather it's all relative relationships. I remember someone explaining to me the method of how they were doing language translations. I would have thought that they would have actually processed the sentence into individual words and extracted the nouns, verbs, etc. and all of their relationships within the sentence before then doing lookups in the target language and reconstructing the sentence. Not at all how it was being done, but rather it was all just based on a bunch of relational lookups that just end up generating something that ends up being correct and making sense most of the time despite the actual program never breaking down the specifics of what it was asked. So my guess is that those bots got into a weird error state where whatever they picked up had data to process so they did not go into an actual error message. So instead they loop forever in nonsense gibberish land. As someone who actually did AI programming the way I always describe it to people is that AI (in its current state who knows what will happen in the future) is nothing more than a magic show designed to give the illusion of intelligence.
And as for my definition of bioroid. I came across the concept of them from tabletop games. Specifically, GURPS: Bio-Tech and Transhuman Space. So basically they're artificially created lifeforms through artificial biogenesis (basically grown in a tank) that are essentially used as slave labor most of the time. I hope we as a species don't go that direction (the slavery part) for ethical reasons., but I do think that if we are to go down the path of wanting to artificially create intelligent life a biological path is more likely than a purely cybernetic one.
And as for my definition of bioroid. I came across the concept of them from tabletop games. Specifically, GURPS: Bio-Tech and Transhuman Space. So basically they're artificially created lifeforms through artificial biogenesis (basically grown in a tank) that are essentially used as slave labor most of the time. I hope we as a species don't go that direction (the slavery part) for ethical reasons., but I do think that if we are to go down the path of wanting to artificially create intelligent life a biological path is more likely than a purely cybernetic one.
That makes sense, I was going by media reports and well I really should know better.
Ah I see, yes I do hope we have matured ethically by the time that technology becomes available. And you're probably correct, though if there's one thing we can be sure about the future it's that it is unpredictable.
Ah I see, yes I do hope we have matured ethically by the time that technology becomes available. And you're probably correct, though if there's one thing we can be sure about the future it's that it is unpredictable.
I mean I haven't read the news stories. I'm just guessing based on that little information you gave. But it is a rather educated guess. I'd be really curious what actually happened and if they even had the debugging data to figure it out just from a programming interest.
From a quick google search I've only been able to find articles about two experimental Facebook AI's, which doesn't seem to be the story as I recall it but I may be misremembering. It wasn't that they were inventing a new language as such rather using a kind of shorthand and they stopped the trial because they wanted them to use proper English.
You could hear the fox shouting "friend! Play!" Loved this one. It made me smile.
And a wonderful first attempt it was, for sure. I quite like the quick transition from being a programmed robot with the sole purpose of doing as it is told to joining the freedom of chasing a silly fox friend.
I've always wondered why robots would build cities in certain media; what do robots need cities for exactly? Are they just massive memory banks and computers or do robots want to at least pretend to live like humans in houses and societies? Whatever the answer, I quite liked the imagery you wrote up and the illustration of the fox and bot was very neat too.
I've always wondered why robots would build cities in certain media; what do robots need cities for exactly? Are they just massive memory banks and computers or do robots want to at least pretend to live like humans in houses and societies? Whatever the answer, I quite liked the imagery you wrote up and the illustration of the fox and bot was very neat too.
Glad you liked it. Robots building cities is such a trope I did not even really consider not doing it, but as you bring up, there is not much logical sense behind it except maybe as some odd preprogrammed remnant of those that originally built and programmed them. I guess here I kind of envisioned there having some local communicated network with a central command tower which would then communicate with other towers for each designated area which in turn creates the likeness of cities that expand from each of the central towers. This is definitely some post hoc justification here, but it kind of makes sense.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to have you justify the decision to write up a robot city (your story, your rules). It's just a little question I always have to wonder when I see something of the like. I do appreciate your thoughts on the matter and the image your story gave me was quite the fascinating spectacle.
Oh, it was less me trying to justify it to you and just me musing out loud as I am now trying to work out actual good world building reasons to justify a robot city. Not just with what I wrote, but overall as it is a visually fun trope.
Well if they have physical bodies they need to live somewhere ;)
A lovely story, nature and machines don't have to be enemies, looks like they both found a friend. I'm guessing the start was a rebellion against the robots?
Yep, that's what was happening at the start. I tried to keep it all localized to what XJ-00209 actually would understand so I was keeping it rather vague.
I'm just gonna say it -- this is the best prompt entry I've read in a long time.
To start with, your prose is excellent. Your paragraphs are tight and focused, your word choice is varied and expressive, and your your sentence structure has a wonderful flow to it that makes every paragraph easy to read. You also have a great balance between narration and introspection that keeps the story fresh and interesting. Even in professional works, I often find my eyes slipping over the text from time to time, but I can truly say I never felt that way here. Technically, I'd say this story is nearly perfect.
I also love the way you write the bot's perspective. You clearly put in a great deal of thought into what a lowly worker droid would notice and what it wouldn't, how it would process what it saw, and how it would evaluate different scenarios. That effort pays off in spades. Apart from just being fun to read, this style also made all of your exposition completely natural. This is honestly one of the best uses of voice I've seen in a long while, and I'll certainly be reviewing it if I ever study on this topic in particular.
And of course, all this technical stuff is in service to a great story. The two parts are juxtaposed wonderfully -- the industrial mecha-civilization of the first half, where the bot is bound to service, contrasts perfectly to the overgrown forest of the second half, where it begins to taste freedom. The decision at the end to give lil' 209 an archive of the past was brilliant as well. I've almost never wanted to keep reading past the end of a short story more than this one. It almost reads like the pitch for a Pixar movie, and one I would be more than happy to greenlight, given the choice.
And then you went and added a great illustration too. The fact that someone can simultaneously be so good at writing and art almost makes me angry. You make it seem so easy...
11/10 stuff. Seriously, this is the best debut piece I've seen for the prompt in a long while. I am very much looking forward to seeing what you produce in the future.
To start with, your prose is excellent. Your paragraphs are tight and focused, your word choice is varied and expressive, and your your sentence structure has a wonderful flow to it that makes every paragraph easy to read. You also have a great balance between narration and introspection that keeps the story fresh and interesting. Even in professional works, I often find my eyes slipping over the text from time to time, but I can truly say I never felt that way here. Technically, I'd say this story is nearly perfect.
I also love the way you write the bot's perspective. You clearly put in a great deal of thought into what a lowly worker droid would notice and what it wouldn't, how it would process what it saw, and how it would evaluate different scenarios. That effort pays off in spades. Apart from just being fun to read, this style also made all of your exposition completely natural. This is honestly one of the best uses of voice I've seen in a long while, and I'll certainly be reviewing it if I ever study on this topic in particular.
And of course, all this technical stuff is in service to a great story. The two parts are juxtaposed wonderfully -- the industrial mecha-civilization of the first half, where the bot is bound to service, contrasts perfectly to the overgrown forest of the second half, where it begins to taste freedom. The decision at the end to give lil' 209 an archive of the past was brilliant as well. I've almost never wanted to keep reading past the end of a short story more than this one. It almost reads like the pitch for a Pixar movie, and one I would be more than happy to greenlight, given the choice.
And then you went and added a great illustration too. The fact that someone can simultaneously be so good at writing and art almost makes me angry. You make it seem so easy...
11/10 stuff. Seriously, this is the best debut piece I've seen for the prompt in a long while. I am very much looking forward to seeing what you produce in the future.
Well I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m seriously blushing at all of your praise. Other than a few failed attempts at writing novels over the years I really didn’t start writing much actual prose (mainly I just created hordes of world building notes) until earlier this year when I started added some stories to my art when I felt it was appropriate. A lot of times I would have little stories behind the pictures I did, but I never could fully explore the story in the picture itself. I like making comics as an alternative, but they are just so much work. Really, I never know how my pose is because I read it myself and I feel like it is ok, but I also tend to be very harsh on my own self-criticism. Plus my mind always drifts back to being forced to read Faulkner back in high school. I always found his actual prose beyond belief, though I hardly cared for the actual stories and their meanings. I actually wonder if I would enjoy them more now that I’m older.
But I digress. If you are curious everything else I’ve written and posted is currently all related to a single setting that I have linked together. It is a mix of pictures with short stories below them, comics, and then one rather long written piece. It starts here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/50960927/
But I digress. If you are curious everything else I’ve written and posted is currently all related to a single setting that I have linked together. It is a mix of pictures with short stories below them, comics, and then one rather long written piece. It starts here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/50960927/
Could've fooled me. The prose is seriously fantastic. Like, study-worthy. I think part of why I enjoy it so much is that it's very direct, much closer to Orwell's clear window pane than Faulkner's stained glass window. Faulkner's prose leaves me in awe, but like you, I always felt like it took center stage, superseding the story it was telling. With your writing, the prose is exactly what it needs to be to tell the story. It's got plenty of variance in sentence structure, and wields effective words skillfully when the moment calls for it, but first and foremost, it's there to tell a story. A very well-written story with an excellent use of direct thoughts and a clever perspective. TL;DR -- writing good.
I feel you on the self-criticism. It's a difficult topic because, on one hand, you want your work to be as good as possible, and any motivation to that end seems like it must be good. On the other hand, it can delay or even dissuade you from writing altogether (not to mention that it's... not great for your mental health.) I hope you can find some equilibrium between the drive to improve and the harshness of your judgement. For what it's worth, if I haven't made it clear enough yet, I think your work is quite excellent.
I don't even want to think about the work that goes into making a comic. Writing alone is hard enough. Little insert pieces like the one in this story, though, go a long way to draw me in while hopefully not adding too much work on your end. I think it's a great balance.
Will most certainly be looking into the world you've created, once I can find the time. If it's anything near this level, I have no doubt it'll be wonderful ^w^
I feel you on the self-criticism. It's a difficult topic because, on one hand, you want your work to be as good as possible, and any motivation to that end seems like it must be good. On the other hand, it can delay or even dissuade you from writing altogether (not to mention that it's... not great for your mental health.) I hope you can find some equilibrium between the drive to improve and the harshness of your judgement. For what it's worth, if I haven't made it clear enough yet, I think your work is quite excellent.
I don't even want to think about the work that goes into making a comic. Writing alone is hard enough. Little insert pieces like the one in this story, though, go a long way to draw me in while hopefully not adding too much work on your end. I think it's a great balance.
Will most certainly be looking into the world you've created, once I can find the time. If it's anything near this level, I have no doubt it'll be wonderful ^w^
Really, I find my self-criticism mostly just strives me to improve with every piece I make. I'm always hungry and never satisfied with the quality of my works and so I constantly challenge myself and bite off bigger projects than I chew. That's why the last time I sat down to write anything before this I aimed for a short story a few pages in length and ended up with 30 page monster 16.5k words in length. I love drawing background works and so I will get myself obsessed with the background detailing. So I definitely gets myself into trouble with the delayed category more than getting myself down at least at this point (I actually stopped posting my art online for nearly 7 years because I was so dissatisfied at it though).
We'll see if I do an answer picture this week. I want to (and already know what I want to draw), but I'm unfortunately travelling this week and barely have enough time to work on the prompt (I actually wrote that previous response while on an airplane). The writing is in progress though, just slower than I would have hoped since the plane didn't actually have plugs for my laptop and it's battery is less than stellar with how old it is. I'm hoping I have enough time to jam out what I want to draw when I return, but I can't make promises.
I will say that comics are really interesting to do. It's hard work because it's a lot of pictures to draw, but there's a lot you can play around with from the nature of the medium. Especially pauses in conversation. Most of the comic work I've put up has been rather humorous and so I've been trying to find a snappy punchline within a page. It's a good way to confine yourself and not get too overburdened, but when I try and do something more serious I tend to use a very deconstructed style with minimal dialog. It's a ton of work and with my perfectionist nature I am unsure any of it ever made its way online, but it is very enjoyable to work on. I have a long TF comic that I am planning to do that way. I've still been tinkering with the character designs and putting together an actual script. I've just been getting distracted with writing for stuff like this and a larger story that I've been working on (it was supposed to be a short story but quickly grew into a massive project). Still, I'm hopeful that one day I'll get around to it.
We'll see if I do an answer picture this week. I want to (and already know what I want to draw), but I'm unfortunately travelling this week and barely have enough time to work on the prompt (I actually wrote that previous response while on an airplane). The writing is in progress though, just slower than I would have hoped since the plane didn't actually have plugs for my laptop and it's battery is less than stellar with how old it is. I'm hoping I have enough time to jam out what I want to draw when I return, but I can't make promises.
I will say that comics are really interesting to do. It's hard work because it's a lot of pictures to draw, but there's a lot you can play around with from the nature of the medium. Especially pauses in conversation. Most of the comic work I've put up has been rather humorous and so I've been trying to find a snappy punchline within a page. It's a good way to confine yourself and not get too overburdened, but when I try and do something more serious I tend to use a very deconstructed style with minimal dialog. It's a ton of work and with my perfectionist nature I am unsure any of it ever made its way online, but it is very enjoyable to work on. I have a long TF comic that I am planning to do that way. I've still been tinkering with the character designs and putting together an actual script. I've just been getting distracted with writing for stuff like this and a larger story that I've been working on (it was supposed to be a short story but quickly grew into a massive project). Still, I'm hopeful that one day I'll get around to it.
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