Qntm, one of the people who writes for the SCP Foundation site, also has a thread on it from the fiction writing angle.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Found a neat tangent whilst going through that thread:
The single most common disciplinary offense on scpwiki for the past year+ has been people posting AI-generated articles, and it is EXTREMELY rare for any of those cases to involve a work that had been positively received
On a personal note, I expect the Foundation to become a reliable source of post-'22 human-made work for the same reasons I stated Newgrounds would recently:
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An explicit ban on AI slop, which deters AI bros and allow staff to nuke it on sight
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A complete lack of an ad system, which prevents content farms from setting up shop
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Dedicated quality control systems (deletion and rewrite policies, in this case) which prevent slop from gaining a foothold and drowning out human-made work
I used to do work maintaining a wiki, and the amount of random spam getting past spam filters (which somebody else maintained) was already pretty high then (esp when something was getting past the filters). I have no idea how bad it is nowadays, but I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain all our infrastructure and keep it shit free. (No not you google).
Thanks for linking that. His point about teenagers and fiction is interesting to me because I started writing horror on the Internet in the pre-SCP era when I was maybe 13 or 14 but I didn't recognize the distinction between fiction and non-fiction until I was about 28. I think that it's easier for teenagers to latch onto the patterns of jargon than it is for them to imagine the jargon as describing a fictional world that has non-fictional amounts of descriptive detail.
Not sure if they still do it, but iirc the scp sire also had a "no roleplay" rule which is also pretty wise to get people into the mindset of treating it as fiction, and a way to tell stories. Gets people out of the mind of "what would I do in that world" and into "what would make the story better".
Speaking purely in terms of literary value, I agree that the output is complete nonsense word salad, but it becomes intriguing precisely because Geoff is evidently finding deep meaning in it and has absorbed the concepts and now writes as if the LLM had taken over his mind. It's very effective horror as far as I'm concerned.
Tbh a lot of stories re our rich vc techbros are horror stories. Imagine coming over to a techbro for an interview and while you arrive he is arms deep in some cadaver which he plans to serve you, Tywin Lannister style.
E: or while riding along on the space techs ceos submarine for an interview, you suddenly wonder why there are powertools on board. Like some bond villain
"GPT independently recognized..." is such a funny sentence
I had not expected chatbots to induce psychosis in this many people. I guess that happens if you believe the lying machine is smarter than you. Don't think this is what rats envisioned when they said ai would be dangerous tho
I've long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth
fucking willison and his bullshit booster takes
“we can’t figure out how to make them stop” just stop using the lies generator, you fuckwit.
taking all the wrong bloody lessons from “computer says no”
The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:
So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.
The fact that these dinguses have more money than most people will ever see in their lives and spurt unimaginable sums of it up the wall in the throes of delusions, commanding thousands of lives and squandering resources that could have built useful things is a repudiation of the just-world meritocratic ideas that rationalise the status quo.
ah, the Billionaire Builder class. I was assured that these are the people who should lead the world “they” have “built”, and see absolutely no issue here whatsoever!~