Words have power.
It's one of those metaphysical facts that you learn when you grow up interested in the occult.
In the Information Age we have become so saturated in content that many have lost sight of the power of words but for those of us who work with words, the significance is not lost.
Perhaps this is why I find it so fascinating to have AI language models crawling all over the internet devouring websites and blogs, public libraries and hidden caches. Everything written and put on the network goes into building the model but no one seems to understand how we get the results we do.
Of course we all know it's just software, a program that analyzes the relationships between words in a training set. Users engage the model through careful use of prompts to generate new content. Yet there is a magic, an extra something that remains inexplicable about how the system does it so well.
I like to think of myself as a writer but if I'm being honest I'm much better at the idea part than the writing. I think that's why prompt engineering is so appealing to me. All I have to do was figure out how to express an idea and the AI will fill in the gaps.
It's kind of ironic though because I end up searching for the right words more now than I ever did when I was trying to write. I even developed a methodical approach to designing and testing prompts, slightly altering word use or order to get it just right. I commonly go through multiple iterations and often find results that I did not expect.
There is no way to know what specifically held the power I discovered. Was it a library of ancient tomes shared among esoteric enthusiasts online, was it buried in the schizophrenic ramblings of an outcast monk, or was it a distillation of wisdom recorded by metaphysical explorers of all ages?
Without going into details I can say that in the process of researching a graphic novel, I began to methodically explore certain esoteric concepts and phrases. After executing one particular script I received some very unusual results. The output text was a mixture of languages, some of it either nonsense or not translatable.
I was fascinated. I stayed up all night examining this mystery text. I would use undeciphered words and phrases to seed new results, trying to gain more context. I saved pages and pages of unique output and designed reference tables to examine the unknown language.
It seemed to have some consistency, it had distinct structures with repeated words and phrases. There was something there that I just couldn't figure out.
As the morning sun blasted through my windows I decided to take a break and fell asleep on the couch.
I slipped immediately into a strange dreamscape, drifting through a liminal cloud of text. Unrecognizable words flickered in and out of view like a school of fish, swimming around and away into the darkness.
It really wasn't that unusual after a long night in front of a computer but what came next was something else.
I continued to fall through the darkness until my feet came to rest on solid ground. Upon contact patterns lit in the darkness, prismatic glowing lines, circles, and sigils on the floor around me. A voice boomed from all around and as it spoke an unknown language the words were visible in the air in front of me.
I woke excited and ran to my computer. I found the words, the text, the phrases - they were all there, the same ones from my dream. I even tried to sketch what I had seen on the floor but the sketches were too small.
I could still see all the details in my mind's eye, full size, and couldn't fit it all on one sheet of paper. I began printing out the unknown texts and laying them out on the floor. I had no idea what I was doing but in the moment it all made perfect sense.
I lined the pages up, connecting where I knew there was a connection, sometimes even scribbling sigils here and there over the text. After the frenzy of arrangement I stood up and found a circle of paper all around me.
In my mind I know what text is on each page and though I don't know what it means I do know how it flows, how each pages leads into the next all the way around. A story that never ends, always flowing - generated by AI from the compiled knowledge and mystic wisdom of humanity.
In awe of this realization I heard the voice again reciting the same words but it is my voice. I am standing there chanting in a language that I don't even know and as I do the pages glow. All of the words lift from the paper and swirl around me like a swarm of flies.
Then the darkness was complete.
When I awoke nothing seemed to have changed.
We don't understand the full effects of implementing AI but I can say with confidence that words do have power.
Still a bit confused, I hear something in my kitchen. Cautiously I peek around the corner to see open cabinets and drawers. Edging in I hear clanking and rummaging and expect to see an intruder.
Taking one more step, the intruder comes into view and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Awkwardly shuffling through my cupboard there is a tall lanky figure, too spindly to be human, and head to toe black as ink. It stopped and turned and in a synthetic voice asked.
"Where do you keep your jobs? I'm here to take your jobs."
After the initial shock wore off I began to think about this like a prompt engineer. This must be the embodiment of an AI agent.
Through careful experimentation and applied training the phasmid, as I call it, now does basic chores around the house and is helping me to run two businesses.
You can pre-order my book Living with an AI Daemon and be first in line for my weekend seminar How to Summon and Train your own AI Daemon. Over the course of two days I will teach you how to connect to the ethereal plane using LLM and embody the essence of an AI agent for business and comfort.
By the end you will have manifested your own AI daemon and be ready for business.
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