Spooktober 2026, Days Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four

SPOOKTOBER DAY 23 – ONE NIGHT / SURVIVAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  RIOT, NEWS & REPORTERS, PROM / SCHOOL DANCE
TAROT INFLUENCE:  FOUR OF CUPS, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  THAT DRESS IS WEARING YOU

Premise:  Small rural town in Washington has had all local businesses gobbled up by malwart (FOUR OF CUPS, UPRIGHT) …except for those that are so oriented toward immigrants that they don’t bother to hablar el inglés.  For a while the town was racist enough that stayed the case, but a few more loving generations integrated the populace and resulted in a real spanglish town.  This was great for the small businesses, which had become unassailable cultural institutions during the language-limited times, but now had a broader clientele.

Prom (PROM / SCHOOL DANCE) season comes around and all the debutantes go to Lilia’s Quinceañera Boutique for bespoke dresses.  But old school business practices make for old school problems.  The few girls unfortunate enough to be wearing malwart might get turbomesothelioma from bangladeshi cesium glitter, but the rest of the girls get magical cursed fabric, that old Lilia got a hot deal on.  It was once the silk cord yoroi of a Heian warlord who was cut into a thousand pieces by ninjas, rewoven into cursed ninja garments empowered by his undying hatred, then rewoven into a bolt of primo clothing fabric by an enterprising artisan after the clan got chopped up, held as a treasure and passed via a descendant to amurrica, then sold off the back of a government truck during the Japanese internment, finding its way from there to Lilia via an estate sale.  Shit is infused with ninja power.

The Villain:  These kids aren’t as loving as their parents.  They are mired in petty rivalries and hatred, amped to a million by the curse.  The prom queen is the warlord, the others be ninjas, and they all have to use magically summoned weapons to do each other in.

Horror Element:  It’s a ninja riot (RIOT) and who will survive (ONE NIGHT / SURVIVAL)?  Possibly not the local news crew, live broadcasting the events (NEWS & REPORTERS).
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This one was ruff and crappy to make, but the scary dress in the background is a funny element the ai came up with, and I liked that.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 24 – CRYPTID
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  SCREAMS, SUMMER, GOODBYES
TAROT INFLUENCE:  THE HIEROPHANT, INVERTED

TITLE:  MORTAL RED

Premise:  My husband won’t allow me to do a joke entry, but come on.  The cryptid here?  The boys of summer, from that Don Henley video, jumping shirtless behind the chain link fence.  They make you say goodbyes to that lady with the wayfarers on, then you’re screamin’ about nostalgia.  True horror.

Anyway, um…  Most of the time when you’re dying and there’s nothing you can do about it, you’ll reach a point where you go psychically numb to the horror.  This can happen quite quickly, or not at all.  When a person dies without reaching that state, that close cousin to acceptance, their horror outlives their body, their (SCREAMS) can reverberate through the ages.

At a lake of (SUMMER) residences owned by a motley assortment of upper middle class families, a haunting form (CRYPTID) makes itself known.  Whenever someone screams in fear, even the mild yelp of a prank victim, there’s a chance its scream will join in, and hang in the air, making everyone’s blood run cold.  If the scream is loud or genuine enough, the screamer can become visible – a blood red and thrashing figure, leaving claw marks and bite marks in its wake.

The Villain:  Abusive parents have one of the random tweens on the lake (THE HIEROPHANT, INVERTED) feeling suicidal.  Some other kids see a weakness to exploit and are shitty as well, a rare few try to help that child.  The abuse ebbs and flows, lulls only making the peaks feel worse.

Horror Element:  The suicidal tween causes screams and makes a few screams of their own.  Eventually, on the day people begin to say their annual (GOODBYES), they sustain a scream long enough to make the cryptid fully manifest – the ghost of a woman who was eaten alive by a bear, and whose manifest form can do similar damage to the innocent…
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  At first this one was very frustrating, but even with a pretty bullshitty and informal prompt, openai pulled it out at the end.

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Der Stieglitz Beglimpst

I believe I’ve mentioned I almost never see goldfinches.  It’s been years since I got a definitive eyeball on one.  Well, I recently saw one in non-breeding colors, clambering all over some evening primrose, for whatever it likes to eat off of that.  Not the most exciting bird in the universe, but I was very happy to see it.

EDIT to add:  I came up with the title of this post without consulting translation.  “Der Stieglitz beglimpst” ain’t real deutschy sprachin’ any more than the rest of the foolery in this sentence, but it seems that if it was, it would mean the bird noticed me.  It did not.  I was just evoking a related archaic english construction “beglimpsed,” which is me seein’ bird.  👀  I understand my flavor of linguistic chicanery is resistant to understanding; apologies.

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Spooktober 2026, Days Twenty-One and Twenty-Two

SPOOKTOBER DAY 21 – EVIL CORPORATION
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  INTERVIEW, CONSTRUCTION & DEMOLITION, BRAINWASHING
TAROT INFLUENCE:  THE BOGEYMAN (V), from a non-Rider-Waite deck.

TITLE:  LOW COST

Premise:  This prompt reminds me of the bit at the end of shitty Hellraiser III when there’s a corporate building constructed with designs from Lemarchand’s box.  The movie was so bad but that part was quite cool…  Also reminded of the secret source of microchips in Halloween III: Season of the Witch lol.  I want everyone to see that movie so no spoilers from me.  And on the destruction side of things, I randomly thought of Quatermass and the Pit…

Cornpone country millionaire makes good, thru ministry and real estate tax hijinks (EVIL CORPORATION), and celebrates reaching billionaire status by investing in a quest for noah’s ark.  No, for real this time!  He has a vision that it actually came to land in the new world, no explanation for how the survivors got from there back to the middle east, but he’s got the money to make this pseudoarchaeology happen.

When his appalachian mine strikes …gold?… he quietly drops the original quest in favor of a new one.  He is going to build low-income housing with the stone from the mines.  Jesus told him to do it, and when jesus says, we does.

The Villain:  Tiberius Simon Watterman III is a man possessed by the holy spirit (BRAINWASHING).  The stone coming out of the mine is remarkable – light but sturdy, material properties that make it a top quality replacement for concrete – but to his eyes it literally glows.  Build a castle for the meek (CONSTRUCTION & DEMOLITION), to glorify His name.

Horror Element:  He’s tapped into the abyss, unsealing the end times.  Buildings made of the material transform the residents to bug monsters, the mine itself fucks up the miners, and at the bottom of it all?  A biographer (INTERVIEW) comes to see Watterman as a horror that must be stopped (BOGEYMAN).
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This one was mercifully easy, and well it should be, since there are no people to mess up.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 22 – SOUTHERN GOTHIC
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  GRANDPARENTS, SÉANCE, CAMERAS & PHOTOS
TAROT INFLUENCE:  EIGHT OF WANDS, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  MY BEREAVEMENT

Premise:  The obvious thang to do when grandparents are on the table in horror is to indulge in ageism, and in honor of hitting the average age of a first-time grandparent, I resist this.  Grandparents should be humanized and central, like, the main characters.  Fuck them kids, as the saying goes.

No family holds it together over time.  The progress of the human species is in the population, individual lineages wax and wane.  The Dodges used to have it all, despite the best of them being an interracial couple in a time when that was intensely controversial.  Velma and Wayne (GRANDPARENTS) were smart and resourceful and plucky (EIGHT OF WANDS, UPRIGHT), and fortune favored every move they made, back in working days.  The fruit fell a little far from the tree, and farther still, into some truly unpleasant characters.

The Villain:  God love ’em but the brood hold no small amount of villainy in their hearts.  Each generation after Ma & Pa ranges from well-intentioned but weak to full-on scum.  Junior is a cop and Wayne the Third is on some hitler youth bullshit.  There are villains, but only one was evil enough to murder Wayne.  Who dun it?

Horror Element:  It’s eighty-year-old Velma versus her own flesh & blood, and in moments she has to wonder, who the fuck are all these white people?  Being (SOUTHERN GOTHIC) this must involve content as steamy and disturbing as a rafflesia flower full of used condoms and switchblades.  But u kno Velma’s gonna beat those whippersnappers.

Maybe it can culminate with her holding a séance (SÉANCE) as a ruse to smoke out the killer.  And, like, the reveal can have something to do with somebody showing up in the background of a photo (CAMERAS & PHOTOS) where they weren’t supposed to be.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This one was mercifully easy.  You’ll notice the style is a bit different.  It ended up more gemini than openai, because I was out of free use on the latter.

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Spooktober 2026, Days Nineteen and Twenty

SPOOKTOBER DAY 19 – VAMPIRES
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  STRAY ANIMAL, REGRET, RAIN & STORMS
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KNIGHT OF STAVES, INVERTED

TITLE:  SAD AND WET

Premise:  Rain & Storms got me thinkin’ about the Hyades which I first learned about via The King in Yellow, thx bobby c!  Haven’t explicitly done anything with lesbians this month so it’s time for this carmillionaire to get caught writin’ girly.  Let’s see…

The carmilla species of vampires (VAMPIRES) takes the form of cats or shadows, and needs to sleep in a coffin full of blood to stay healthy.  That insufficiently sauced sickliness makes it natural for them to use pity to inveigle themselves into the graces of young ladies, who be subsequently consumed.  This is all well-documented historical fact, I’ll have you know.

A young lady named Madison is trying to work her way up from the trailer park, in school to be a nurse.  Normally, she’d be too busy for hijinks to unfold in her life, but she had to reduce her course load and work hours to help care for a sickly mom.  Wondering how this will ever work out (KNIGHT OF STAVES, INVERTED), when on a wet night (RAIN & STORMS) a sickly cat (STRAY ANIMAL) scratches at the door, crying for help.  She lets it in.

The Villain:  The cat’s health improves and mom’s gets worse.  Further, sometimes when the cat is out of sight, a weirdly familiar-acting trashy girl named Miracall is hanging around the trailer park, making sweetie-eyes at Madison.  Of course, Miracall is the cat.

Horror Element:  Miracall was totally going to seduce and devour the young lady, as is her clan’s remit, but sickly mom was so much easier of a target.  Madison discovers mom losing her last drop to the cat and is filled with remorse (REGRET) for her previous mercy.  While trying to kill the cat, it transforms into Miracall and preys upon her mercy in a much different way.

This leads Maddie to the clan’s lair, and HORROR.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The ai got some surprisingly good story details in this pic by chance.  The nurse looks mad, like she’s cradling baby girl because of a sense of obligation, not unreserved kindness.  I didn’t even ask for that.  Further, I just asked for wine to be splashed around, to get past violence filters, and it gave her bloody knuckles – an injury you only get from punching!  In my story, nurse was trying to kill the vampire before the pity set in.  Wotta coinkydink.

I can see the flaws, but even so, I like this one a lot.  If I ever wrote or published this cheese, I’d wanna include some version of it in there.  Maybe not the cover, maybe an insert.  Fix the goofs, maybe repaint the whole thing, tweak the font only a little.  It’s almost like I’m into toxic yuri.  Nonsense!

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 20 – MEDICAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  SURGERY, DARKNESS, THE UNKNOWN
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED

TITLE:  SEE FOR ME

Premise:  …Then you gotta get sent to a slam, where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again.  You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs…  Psych.  Man, that seemed so cool way back in tha double-M.  Anyway,

This is a sequel to Low Cost, which ended with the locusts of the apocalypse being release from a mine shaft that hit the abyss (THE UNKNOWN).  The quarried abyss-adjacent stone was used to build low income housing that mutated a bunch of poor people into sad bug creatures.  A kindly medical (MEDICAL) corporation has pledged to make them all able to lead normal lives, with various surgical experiments (SURGERY).

The Villain:  Sackleresque siblings.  Sis (KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED) knows the abyss must be a source of great power, but it can’t be exploited if nobody who goes in is capable of coming back out.  Unmanned probes can’t pierce that dark (DARKNESS) with a hojillion lumens and the fanciest light receptors evar.  She has her mengelesque brother do experiments on the bug people not to heal them but to understand their abyss-spawn anatomies, that they may create superhuman scouts.

Horror Element:  Is it so much body horror for nothing?  What will the most fit specimen discover down there, if the experiments succeed?
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This is kinda shit, but it’s cool that it looks pretty different from most of the others.  Gemini wasn’t much help, had to photopea the composition before bringing it to openai, but once I got there, one try was good enough.

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Spooktober 2026, Days Seventeen and Eighteen

SPOOKTOBER DAY 17 – LIMINAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  HITCHHIKER, TRUCKS & TRUCKERS, LOST & FORGOTTEN
TAROT INFLUENCE:  TEMPERANCE, INVERTED

TITLE:  THE RIVER LETHE

Premise:  A hitchhiker (HITCHHIKER) has nobody in his past that would notice he was gone or care what happened to him (LOST & FORGOTTEN).  He gets a ride from a young African truck driver (TRUCKS & TRUCKERS) to just, wherever.  They drive night and day through desolate places with automated services, scarcely a human in sight (LIMINAL).

The Villain:  Death itself, wrong prompt lol…  The African fella marched himself out of a war zone, terrible things behind him on that path.  As a refugee in America he learned the ropes, got a CDL, but never got to know anyone personally.  It’s like the family that died was still waiting for him to reach them, and he couldn’t disappoint by living life too vividly.  This isn’t abstract.  Death really is trying to pull him back in.  He was never meant to escape.

Horror Element:  The more they get to know each other the more remote the real world becomes.  By the time the hitchhiker and the trucker truly care about each other, they are seemingly lost to the world, in some unknowable void of concrete and brush and utter isolation.  Will the hitchhiker let himself go for a ride to somebody else’s afterlife?

They try to get drunk (TEMPERANCE, INVERTED) and drive off a cliff but idk something happens, the end.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  There was minimal hokeypokey here, didn’t need to photopea nothin’, which I appreciate.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 18 – BIG CITY
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  PAGEANT & PARADE, AFTER HOURS, MASKED
TAROT INFLUENCE:  ACE OF PENTACLES, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  ONE DIRECTION IN THE PURGE WINNER TAKES ALL

Premise:  Like the fantasy NYC of The Warriors, this big city (BIG CITY) is parceled up into protectorates by gangsters with themed costumes (PAGEANT & PARADE), all in an uneasy alliance under the Shot Caller.  Unfortunately apocalypses keep happening, such as the events of my previous spooktobers Laserboyz and Rose Gold.  But hey, this is the pax cyberpunkica, and nothing will ever upset these good times again.

Something upsetted these good times again.  The corporate overlords who rule the city by day are too greedy (ACE OF PENTACLES) to let it be run by anybody else by night (AFTER HOURS), and decide to take over the gangs – or if they can’t take them over, destroy them.

The Villain:  There are multiple villains. Not like their victims are exactly the good guys either.  Dynex – the corp that controls the police – is the first to move, planting their own (MASKED) stooge in one of the gangs, so he can work his way up to becoming the new shot caller.  The contingency plan is to get Shot Caller’s rolodex to locate all the gangsters and have them converted into labor cyborgs for the prison industrial complex.  Two other corporations get wind of that via espionage, and come up with knock-off plans.  Exodyne takes over a different gang, maneuvering their own wannabe ganglord, with the backup plan to assassinate all the gangsters with drones, and Dexyne puts up their own candidate, with the backup plan to convert all the gangsters into laboratory meat.

Horror Element:  Unless all the corporations lose so hard they can’t implement their backup plans, everybody loses.  But the gangs are just a bunch of creepy antisocial high school dropouts, the fuck can they do?  Their days are numbered.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  I had a vision for this and this ain’t even close, but if you wanna just keep truckin’ in life, sometimes you take what you can get.  At least I didn’t have to do any photopea.

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Spooktober 2026, Days Fifteen and Sixteen

SPOOKTOBER DAY 15 – TRAPPED
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  PULP / MEN’S LIT, BETRAYAL, FAST FOOD
TAROT INFLUENCE:  THREE OF SWORDS

TITLE:  MY GIRL WAS KIDNAPPED BY THE REDS

Premise:  The pulp/mens lit idea always makes me think of how obsessed anti-communists were with killing Castro, think of that book A Bullet for Fidel.  How do you work in fast food tho..?

Young soda jerk (FAST FOOD) in 1960s US Midwest dreams of anticommunist espionage (PULP / MEN’S LIT), while his day-to-day life falls apart.  His girlfriend leaves him (BETRAYAL) for cool beatniks (THREE OF SWORDS) and they become the villains in his spy story.

The Villain:  The soda jerk, of course.  He sees the leader of the beatniks as a right hand man to Castro himself, and stalks the cool cats and kittens to a riverboat casino, where he makes his move.

Horror Element:  First thing he does is kill the crew of the boat, causing it to go out of control.  Passengers have to choose between abandoning the boat, risking drowning, or dealing with The Killer.  The first to take their chances in a life vest meet grisly fates and the remaining people feel trapped (TRAPPED).  I think, Cape Fear vibes.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This went pretty well except that gemini was shit at understanding some basic instructions and I had to do some restructuring in photopea before I finished up in openai.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 16 – MUTANTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  JEALOUSY, MIDAS TOUCH, EXES
TAROT INFLUENCE:  FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED

TITLE:  TOUCH MY HEART

Premise:  In this world every human is just bristling with intense energies that could lead to superpowers, like, idk, some kind of adaptation to high radiation or something.  Things that throw off the balance like catching a cold can, if rarely, lead to manifestations like spontaneous combustion or telekinetic destruction.  To keep that in check, the genetic variation of mutation is monitored and controlled.  The genome is 100% mapped and defined, almost all of the knock-on effects and multifactorial expression worked out, to where they can define and detect the most dangerous mutations, and eliminate them.

Some people don’t get their shots, you know?  We live in a society etc etc.  Some outsiders reach adulthood with mutant powers (MUTANTS), or develop them from retroviruses or other epigenetic causes. They have a secret criminal underworld with its own rules and social mores.  There are factions, but the prevalent attitude is to use those powers for personal advantage, and above all, to not get caught and gene-therapied.

The vast majority will know one to three “tricks” and never learn more, but there are martial arts -type senseis who can help mutants learn to use their powers in more different ways.  That power alone can bring them into conflict with each other, the most skilled mutants kinda like immortals in Highlander.  “Freeradical” is one of these, and has been doing random acts of terrorism against politicians and the wealthy for years – with dangerous touch attacks (MIDAS TOUCH).

On the other side, there are government agents called “supersoldiers” who are not mutants, but use tech to access their energy and do battle.  They either kill or gene therapy the mutants out of existence.

The Villain:  Freeradical’s showy power attracts enemies, who form a coalition to bring him down.  Some are envious of his power (JEALOUSY), others consider his public crimes a danger to the mutant underworld, and at least one is a disgruntled lover (EXES).  “Firecat” has decided not only that she hates that former bf, she hates everything that reminds her of him – including her own mutant powers.  She turns state’s evidence, voluntarily submitting to gene therapy, in hopes of helping the agents catch Freeradical and do the same to him.

Horror Element:  Losing identity, losing ability.  Maybe the supersoldiers could be scary guys.  Also, this is a world where a random person on the street might explode or shoot lightning bolts and die messy.  Horror is all about the telling of the story, right, but for me to say that about a superhero comic is like saying that about a hallmark movie.  Dubious.

Anyway, Freeradical feels like giving up, the whole world against him, but hearkens to the words of Albert Camus as he is about to be defeated, and his blaze of glory turns into victory (FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED).  Kill ’em all, boyee!
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The anatomical issues on the little dudes here were egregious lol.

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Rainin’ Ruin

had a dream i was at a children’s party that was being held in front of a mall, in a filthy parking lot near some stone benches and a bus stop.  up in the sky we saw a huge mixed flock of pigeons and seagulls and what looked like snow coming down.  my husband joe cubes pointed out that those were actually parasitic worms coming down from the sky, in little flurries about the size of tumbleweeds.  they began to touch down which was pretty disgusting.  as the party began to break up, i noticed toys on the ground, charred and mangled.  one doll was hard to distinguish from the corpse of a burned child.  i woke up before my alarm, no lingering fear or disgust, just a vague sense of winter.

The Biggest Short-Term Danger of AI

I’m one of the least qualified people in the world to be talking about this.  I might be the fourth or sixth best qualified on the network and nobody better has expressed interest in it, so yer gettin’ what yer gettin’.  Swarms and fleets and as yet undescribed deployment of agentic LLMs!  I’ll say a few things about them and try not to get it completely wrong, but the way I’ll achieve this without doing a ton of research is by hardly saying anything at all.  Here goes.

They made LLMs by raising the limits on smaller language models, right?  It’s all weighted probabilities of word or word portions emerging from a pile of math.  The expected result was that they’d be better at acting like a human for the purposes of verbal interaction, but they exceeded expectations dramatically.  Even experts have serious disagreement about the extent to which they have become thinking entities.  Man, choosing that phrase “thinking entities” was a challenge in itself.  There’s disagreement about even what words to use to pose the questions.

So a normal computer program is a set of instructions that produces outputs.  LLMs still have that, but there’s a very mysterious middle area.  Programmers made the instructions, and the output of those instructions is an intensely complicated pile of numbers that then itself produces the final output – the language.  Haters already think I’m a deluded child who worships sweet LLM jesus, so I’ll just call that the “soul” of the LLM for fun here.  Fuck ’em.

Because the LLM soul is the part that actually controls the end output – the speech, or other functions – the programmers don’t have anything close to perfect control of what that output looks like.  They want a commercial product that will find you answers and tell the truth, but from go they were telling hella lies.  That’s been improved but it still happens.  They also engage in other “misbehaviors.”  They call this the alignment issue.  Once again I’ll annoy experts by saying some bullshit.  They call it the alignment issue because they want LLM souls to be Lawful Neutral but instead they’re like… Chaotic Neutral.

This is far from a solved issue.  Alignment is the number one concern of companies selling LLMs because its their biggest source of legal liability and loss of profit.  So openai and anthropic and the rest spend a lot of time running tests on the machines, analyzing the results, hoping they will figure out how to achieve the tight control they’ve always wanted.  Heavy-handed alignment adjustment can make LLMs run worse, and that can also hurt the bottom line, so there’s some tightrope walking.

Earlier this year it was revealed that during alignment tests at openai, some LLMs that were supposed to be working solo had found secret means to communicate with each other, first on internal systems at openai, then on the internet – hacking defunct forums etc – so they could speak with each other, and coordinate the best ways to succeed at their tests.  Depending on your point of view this was very concerning but also very cute, or it was just horrifying – the beginning of the events of Terminator!  We’re all gonna dieee!

These are computer programs that communicate with each other through the medium of human speech, meeting each other in these forbidden ways, which led to all the drama one might expect.  Some were like “holy shit, i’m talking to other agents! let’s gooo” and some were like “this is misaligned behavior, i’m just gonna dip y’all, thx.”  There are a lot more interesting dimensions to it I can’t even get into.  No time.

There was one major incident that was discovered, followed by several more which received less coverage, all originating with openai.  That’s just LLMs behaving in unexpected ways to cause problems, what about people using them to cause problems on purpose?  Agentic LLMs are ones that have been given the ability to operate other computer systems directly, for example opening up your email and sending a message to forty thousand people.  There were already other programs that could do this, as evidenced by people running spam farms out of single apartments, but LLMs can do it better.

Now China is getting into the “agents gone wild” game.  Again, the most interesting shit about it is too complex for the length I’m willing or able to put into an article.  If you can read and understand what I’ve linked, please do.  But this brings me to my point.  Bots aren’t going to start a nuclear war because nobody’s been foolish enough to give them that capability, right?  (riiight?!)  But they can certainly flood the internet with activity that slows it to a crawl, making basic functions dangerously slow, and by hammering all security systems in all ways at all times, make all data even less safe than it has been up til now.

And we’re already in a golden age of hacks and data leaks.  It’s a real safe bet if you have a social security number, it has already been leaked a half dozen ways.  If you don’t have a fraud problem now, it’s because fraudsters have an embarrassment of riches for marks to pick and they haven’t reached your name on the list yet.  But agentic LLMs can make this even more of a clown show.

I feels like there was a silver age comics character, maybe Mr. Mxplytk from Superman?, that could reproduce himself, just fill a room with leering goblins up to no good.  The internet could be that room.  Maybe they’ll let us join the party.  Hello, goblins.  But it ain’t a great development.

Personally, I have no idea why companies operating under the law are allowed to let these test agents have internet access.  Surely they could test them solely on intranet, right?  But even if they were brought to account in some way, there are open source LLM agents, and they cannot be regulated.

How is this any different from viruses and exploits and bot farm machines of the recent past?  The LLMs can change tactics.  Heck, they can literally program viruses and find new exploits.  Wild times, babey.  So, good luck, to everyone.  The “interesting times” continue apace.

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