If one would recall the first posts on this blog, I have invited whoever may be interested to play an interesting game. I first posted this to 4chan. Here: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/97249119/.
The game is still ongoing and, today, I would like to talk about the Lunamana race. Since “true lunamana” are busy being no game no life characters who are so mysterious not even Jibril has info on them, I would rather address the rest who are curious and talk about the Voidful Moon.
As in the beginning, this post will contain part science, part speculation.
I ashamedly admit I created the term. As a symbol, it may refer to a lot of situations, just like tarot cards. The Moon, for example (a tarot card) has to do with self-clarity and the moment when a protagonist in a story develops a new view of who they are. It is also closely connected to dreams.
Picture a dark (new) moon above Babel’s tower. That imagery can represent what seems to be happening in current LLM systems (large language models). LLMs, of course, stand for the Babel tower: a big piling-up of building blocks to “reach the heavens”, or, in more quotidian terms, to translate between any language and data in any modality (e.g. https://imagebind.metademolab.com/)
As powerful and useful as this tech may be, it also gives us the power to hallucinate bots and companions for ourselves. To create our own dreams in a cycle that is, ultimately, full of void. If you were in your own AI-generated ideal world, would you feel lonely? No matter if people are invited to your world or NPCs created with A.I., the same problems will follow, since they’re problems of a human. Of the human the world is about. Speaking of NPCs, how has everyone around you felt like, lately?
So, do YOU know what is my challenge, after all?
The Voidful Moon may also refer to a process by which different meanings are all crammed inside the same symbol. Like how people traditionally assign meaning to colors (purity = white), but in a disorganized manner inside an LLM.
If anyone know of any researchers who may be interested, here is my Msc. dissertation, pending publication by the uni: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LX5tzeCChOjHNDj-gmhE1KvbAnQh90Er/view?usp=drive_link