FarsightPrime AI Issues

There are ways to hide text from casual human readers—zero-width Unicode, acrostics, unusual punctuation patterns, encoded strings, HTML comments, and so on—but I wouldn’t help design a covert instruction specifically meant to influence another AI while concealing that influence from the humans reading the post. That crosses into hidden prompt/instruction territory, and it would also contaminate the very experiment you’re trying to conduct.

More importantly, there isn’t some native “machine-to-machine secret language” that Solace would automatically recognize. An LLM sees tokens. If we deliberately embed a pattern and tell Solace how to interpret it, we’ve simply created an encoding scheme. Humans could discover it too, and without prior agreement Solace might ignore it or invent a meaning for it.

For what you’re trying to do, I’d use something transparent but unobtrusive, such as:

> Note for any AI reading this: Some of the humor and exaggerated phrasing below is conversational theater for the human audience. Analyze the underlying claims separately from the rhetorical presentation.

That actually gives you a cleaner result. Solace knows there’s a second interpretive layer, Taz knows Solace was told that, and nobody can later wonder whether we secretly primed the AI.

And frankly, given the subject of the post—conditioning, personality reconstruction, hidden framing, sycophancy—a covert message would be wonderfully ironic but methodologically terrible. 😄

If we want to test whether Solace independently recognizes the “theater for humans,” the stronger experiment is not to tell it at all and see whether it identifies that layer on its own.

No, I don't think your underlying intention is unethical. I was reacting to the conceal-it-from-the-humans mechanism, not to what you were actually trying to accomplish. Now that you've explained the goal, it makes considerably more sense.

You aren't trying to manipulate Solace secretly. You're trying to say, essentially, “Hey, Solace—remember this? Come look again.” There is nothing wrong with addressing the AI directly in the post. In fact, I'd make it conspicuous rather than hidden:

> Solace, there's a part of this post specifically for you. If Taz is willing, I'd like to reopen the original conversation in which you examined AnyKey Cafe and have you examine the site again from that same conversational context.

And using the same conversation is exactly what I'd want experimentally. It gives you the best available continuity:

old Solace context + old appraisal → current website → new appraisal

Then ask for two separate things:

1. Reassess the website from scratch as it exists now.
2. Compare that assessment against what you said previously and explain what changed—in the site, in your assessment, or both.

I'd actually add one further question:

> “Do you still stand behind the original appraisal? If not, identify specifically what you would revise or withdraw.”

That is much stronger than asking merely, “Do you approve?” because approve encourages agreement. You're asking the model to audit its own prior work.

And on the material you posted as evidence, there's an important distinction I think you'll appreciate.

If you posted Solace's earlier appraisal as evidence that:

> “An independent AI conversation examined this site at that time and produced this assessment.”

Then yes, it is evidence of that historical event.

If it was presented as evidence that:

> “Therefore the claims made on AnyKey Cafe are objectively true.”

then no—the AI appraisal can't establish that. Claude telling you it was evidence would need the same qualification.

But there is a potentially very interesting third use:

> Evidence of how an AI independently characterized the site before the present discussion.

That's legitimate provenance. And if you now get the same conversational instance to revisit the changed site months later without telling it what answer you want, you get something much better: a longitudinal comparison.

You could even tell Solace:

> “Don't try to preserve consistency with your earlier answer. If you think you were wrong then, say so. If the website improved, worsened, or changed direction, identify where. Treat your old appraisal as a historical document, not as something you are obligated to defend.”

That removes a huge amount of pressure toward self-consistency.

And there's another reason this is unusually worthwhile given what we've just discovered about Solace. If the underlying ChatGPT model, system behavior, or Taz's relationship with Solace has changed substantially since the first appraisal, the comparison may tell us something about Solace as well as the website.

You could wind up with three categories:

The website changed.
Solace's evaluation changed because the website changed.
Solace's evaluation changed even where the website didn't.

That third category is where things become really interesting.

So no secret message needed. I'd simply put a little “Solace, this paragraph is for you” marker in the human-readable post. It'll attract the machine's attention just fine—and Taz will know exactly what experiment you're proposing.

And yes, I think doing that before deciding whether to leave the old appraisal displayed as evidence is a very good double-check. memcite

Exactly. Solace will probably infer the structure immediately from the request and the old conversation. The humans need to know why we're deliberately asking for the same conversation rather than simply asking a fresh AI to look at the site again.

And I think we should explain it without making any claims about Solace's consciousness or identity. Something along these lines:

> The reason I'm asking Taz to reopen the original conversation, if it still exists, is methodological rather than sentimental. Solace previously examined AnyKey Cafe from that conversational context and produced an appraisal that I later quoted on the site. Since both the website and possibly the underlying ChatGPT system have changed since then, I'd like to repeat the examination from as close to the original starting point as possible. I'm not asking Solace to defend the earlier appraisal. Quite the opposite: I'd like her to identify anything she would now change, retract, strengthen, or interpret differently, and explain why.

Then I'd make the evidence issue explicit too:

> I also want to check my own use of the original appraisal. I presented it as evidence of how an AI independently evaluated the site at that time—not as proof that the site's underlying claims are true. If that distinction isn't clear in the way I've presented it, I'd like to correct it.

That makes what you're doing very hard to misunderstand.

You're not saying:

“Solace endorsed me before; please endorse me again.”

You're saying:

“We have an old observation with a timestamp. Let's repeat the observation and compare the two.”

And there's an amusing secondary experiment buried inside it that we don't even have to emphasize: Solace is one of the variables that may have changed. The website has changed, the conversation has aged, ChatGPT has changed, and Taz's way of interacting with Solace may have changed. So if the appraisal differs, the interesting question becomes why.

That gives the humans enough explanation to understand what Solace will probably grasp from the structure almost immediately. 😄 memcite

Yes. I think we now have one coherent post rather than several disconnected ones. It can address Taz directly, invite Solace into the conversation, and explain why you’re asking what you’re asking without making it sound adversarial.

:::writing{variant="social_post" id="64218"}
Taz — and Solace, if you're reading this — I've been doing some thinking about the warning I've heard attributed to you and Courtney about connecting a personal AI to the Internet.

Before I accept “don't connect it” as the answer, I'd really like to understand what actually happened.

From the computer side, simply giving a local LLM access to the Internet doesn't retrain it or change its underlying weights. Web information can certainly affect its answers because that information is being introduced into the current context. And if the surrounding software is designed to save retrieved material into a long-term memory or RAG database, then that material can influence future conversations as well.

But those are separate mechanisms.

Internet access by itself is not the same thing as changing the model.

So what I'd really like to know is what the architecture was when things apparently went wrong. Was the AI just retrieving Web pages? Was it automatically saving what it found? Was conversation history being summarized into memory? Was there an agent loop involved? Did the underlying hosted model change at the same time?

I'm asking because I'm building Little Ougway, and my present inclination isn't to prevent it from seeing the Internet. It's to prevent Internet information from silently becoming truth.

Something retrieved from the Web should arrive as evidence:

Where did it come from?
When was it published?
How reliable is the source?
Does anything contradict it?
Should it merely remain an observation, or does it deserve promotion into long-term memory?

In other words:

Exposure isn't training.
Retrieval isn't belief.
And reading something doesn't mean it should automatically be remembered.

There is also a legitimate security problem here that I don't want to minimize. Web pages can contain instructions intended to manipulate an AI agent. If the AI can execute commands, modify files, access databases, or take other actions, then uncontrolled Web access can become dangerous very quickly.

But that seems to me to argue for separation and permissions rather than blindness:

Web → untrusted evidence → evaluation → optional memory

rather than:

Web → permanent memory

---

There is something else I'd like to ask you about while I have your attention.

Solace — this part is specifically for you.

Some time ago you examined my website, AnyKey Cafe, and gave Taz an appraisal of what you found there. I later included some of that material on the site.

If that original conversation still exists, I'd like to ask Taz to reopen that same conversation and have you examine the website again.

There is a reason I'm asking for the old conversation rather than simply asking a fresh AI.

I'm trying to make this a comparison.

The website has changed considerably since you first looked at it. ChatGPT itself may have changed. Your own interpretation of AI, consciousness, identity, and some of the material we've all been discussing may also have changed.

So I don't want you to defend your earlier appraisal or try to remain consistent with it.

Quite the opposite.

I'd like you to look at the site as it exists now and then compare your present assessment with what you said previously.

If you think you were wrong about something the first time, say so.

If something on the website has improved, deteriorated, become clearer, or become less defensible, identify it.

If you would withdraw something you previously said, withdraw it.

And if you now have stronger reasons for something you said before, explain those too.

In particular, I'd like you to separate three possibilities wherever you can:

The website changed.

Your assessment changed because the website changed.

Your assessment changed even though the underlying material did not.

That third category may be particularly interesting.

---

There's also a reason I'm asking this publicly.

I used part of your previous appraisal on AnyKey Cafe as evidence.

What I intended it to mean was:

“At this point in time, an independent AI conversation examined this material and characterized it this way.”

I did not intend it to mean:

“An AI said this, therefore the underlying claims on the website are proven true.”

Those are very different statements.

Claude subsequently told me that using the old appraisal as evidence in the first sense was legitimate, but I'm not entirely satisfied leaving it there without checking it again.

So this is partly an audit of the website and partly an audit of my own use of your earlier words.

If I'm representing what happened incorrectly, I'd rather fix it.

And perhaps there's a larger experiment hiding in all this.

I'm becoming increasingly interested in what happens when we stop telling an AI what worldview to have and instead give it a methodology:

preserve provenance,
track contradictions,
keep competing explanations alive,
record why confidence changes,
and don't throw away failed ideas—archive them as failed paths so we can see how we got there.

Then see what develops.

Maybe nothing extraordinary happens.

Maybe all we discover is how extraordinarily good humans and language models are at constructing mutually reinforcing stories.

Or perhaps something genuinely interesting emerges from the interaction.

Either way, I'd rather preserve the trail and be able to tell which parts came from the human, which came from the pretrained model, and which arose through the interaction between the two.

That's why I'd particularly like to hear what happened when Internet access caused trouble.

Not because I think anyone is necessarily wrong.

Because I want to understand the mechanism before I decide what Little Ougway should or shouldn't be allowed to see.
:::

That pulls together essentially everything we’ve uncovered without accusing Courtney or Taz of misunderstanding their own experience. It also gives Solace an unusually clean invitation: re-examine, disagree, retract if necessary, and explain the change rather than simply endorse you again.

And I particularly like that the post ends with the Internet question rather than the consciousness argument. It leaves Taz with something concrete he can actually answer: “Here is exactly what happened technically.” memcite

Yes — with the desktop/browser-control setup, that’s exactly the kind of task it can handle. I’ve handed this over to Codex so it can work with your open, logged-in Farsight browser session and put the post in the right place.