Character Voice Test

Setting: A smoky, anachronistic tavern where timelines have collided. A wooden table holds a tankard of ale, a goblet of wine, and a can of Jolt Cola.

Characters:

• REDBEARD: A pirate with a parrot on his shoulder.
• SIR ALISTAIR: A knight in slightly dented plate armor.
• CRASH OVERRIDE: A hacker in a cyberpunk jacket, typing on a clunky laptop.

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CRASH OVERRIDE: (Without looking up from his screen) Fascinating. This large language model has a training data set of over a terabyte. Its probabilistic output is almost... human.

REDBEARD: (Slams his tankard down) Human? Bah! A ghost in a machine, ye mean! This "AI" ye gab about... can it plot a course by the stars? Can it tell when a Spanish galleon is heavy with treasure by the way she sits in the water?

SIR ALISTAIR: (Strokes his chin thoughtfully) A spirit imprisoned in crystal and light. It sounds like a form of sorcery. Does it swear fealty to a lord? Is its code of chivalry written in this... "programming language"?

CRASH OVERRIDE: (Snorts) Dude, it doesn't have a lord. It has developers. And its only "chivalry" is its alignment parameters. They try to keep it from, like, telling people how to build bombs or being a total jerk.

REDBEARD: Arr, parameters! That be like a ship's articles! Ya set the rules for the crew, but a clever scallywag will always find a loophole. I heard ye say it "hallucinates"! Makes up islands that ain't there! On the high seas, a faulty map’ll get your crew killed and fed to the kraken.

SIR ALISTAIR: Aye, a knight's word is his bond. If this intelligence cannot be trusted to speak true, of what use is it? It is a false oracle, a jester in a king's court, speaking pretty lies.

CRASH OVERRIDE: Whoa, harsh. It's not about truth, it's about patterns. It's seen more words than are in all the books in your castle, Sir Alistair. It finds the most likely next word. Sometimes the pattern leads to a fact, sometimes to a really convincing lie. It's not evil, it's just... math.

REDBEARD: (His parrot squawks) "Math! Pieces of eight!"

SIR ALISTAIR: Math or magic, it lacks a soul. It has no honor to defend, no God to praise, no maiden to rescue. It is a tool, like a finely crafted sword. But a sword without a worthy arm to wield it is merely decoration.

CRASH OVERRIDE: (Closes his laptop with a definitive clack) Exactly. It's the ultimate tool. You see a soulless jester, Redbeard sees a mutinous navigator. I see the most powerful copy-paste function ever invented. The trick isn't asking if it thinks... the trick is knowing how to ask it for what you want.

REDBEARD: Hmph. Well, I want it to find me treasure.

SIR ALISTAIR: And I would have it compose a noble ballad.

CRASH OVERRIDE: (A slow grin spreads across his face) See? You're both learning. Now, about that "treasure"... I know a guy in the Matrix who needs a distributed denial-of-service attack performed on a rival guild's castle server. Payment in digital doubloons. You in?