The (Condensed) Story of the RayBot.Help Launch Day

Thank you, Author's Tier subscriber! (I would auto-populate your name here, but there is a certain intersection where The Mammal Privacy & Decency Act of 1933* meets Computer Variable Technology,** and I am not comfortable navigating it on my own.)

Speaking of navigating, our team (Jason, David, Ben, and me) got RayBot off the ground yesterday in classic tech launch fashion, or what I call, "long stretches of generalized anxiety, punctuated by moments of sheer terror." First, the dev at achewood.com accidentally leaked the RayBot link two hours early. Then, just after launch, the suite of filters that prevent toxicity and violence in the input and output were inexplicably down. At another point the inevitable happened and some lost soul found a way to game the system to make it say an unacceptable slur. Drastic misinterpretations of the AI-assisted enterprise, as it related to the generation of new Achewood content, propagated like a campfire creeping into the nearby pine needles. From our respective seats around a dinner table in a borrowed apartment in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, we worked the day away, stamping out the gremlins as they multiplied. We went to a Korean Barbecue place that we had also visited at lunchtime, so depleted were our imaginations. We outlined the next iterations of the project, which we hope to release á-la-rat-a-tat. We wondered why there was an Igloo cooler full of socks for sale near the men's room.

We awoke the next day, today, to no great conflagration, confused that there wasn't something to worry about. The service was humming along; the discourse had harmonized into a pleasant stability. We went to Casper's, a hot dog stand I used to visit as a child, when I grew up in nearby Danville. Like most nostalgic fast food meals, my chili-cheese dog was...not vivid. A chili-cheese dog which does not attain gestalt is not worth any part of the experience. That I am writing about a disappointing hot dog lunch says a lot about the contrast between yesterday and today. 

So, this first project is, in our eyes, a total success. It's generating reams of hilarious content, and making tens of thousands of people very happy. Yes, a few joyless miscreants are still "red-teaming" it, to make it say nasty things they can post online, in an attempt to discredit the project and the AI that powers it (the established base of anti-AI people is large, vociferous, and, to their credit, undiscriminating). But the prevailing sentiment is reasonable and correct: this is a fun thing, isn't the world amazing and beautiful, let's see where it goes next.

Oh, and, we're getting lots of nice response to our generalized "talent call" -- do you see yourself in there anywhere?

I am deeply grateful to Liz Lopatto of The Verge and Joshua Rivera of Polygon for covering my reemergence, and this project, so wonderfully. Both asked insightful and provocative questions that helped me expand my own thinking on what all of this means. It's so nice working with professional journalists, where with each new paragraph you don't find yourself clenching in anticipation of the massive misquote you know is coming. ("'I am an oleaginous and unevenly-balding man with no scruples,' cackled Onstad by phone, the wet cigar butt audibly squelching between his teeth.")

Unless there is outrage over me posting personal things like this in this tier, I will continue to share stories from this side of the fourth wall, in addition to the other promised categories of things.

Thank you so much for your support!

Chris

Verge article link 

Polygon article link 

*This is where the practice of putting black tape over the actors' eyes in stag films began. It's also why, for reasons no one can remember, there has never been a drawing, lithograph, or animated film of a man shaking "hands" with a hoot owl.

** "x + 7 = Frederick", for example