Yes, AI is bad. While we have Hex, Golems, Death, and other forms of "artificial intelligence," I believe Terry's takes so far have been moreso on "Artificial Humanity."
His take on LLMs would not be so charitable. A machine made to make life easier grown into an all consuming monster. While I do not think I can match the wit of the great Pterry, I'd like to think I do a pretty good job. So without further ado, here's my take on how a machine that knows its letters would fare in the disc.
I'll take you through a story of Moist Von Lipwig's attempt to make sorting mail easier and more accessible to all, only to fall into the folly of success and profit seeking where the Librarian becomes our protagonist in his war to protect books and learning. It will explore L-Space hopefully introduce the other librarians of the disc eventually taking on the AGI. Yes, the LLM is the bad guy.
Moist has a problem of success. The mail system is going great, but there's some really complex bottlenecks that he wants to tackle.
What good is the mail for those without the education to write them? How do you protest a fine or tax if you can't fill out the forms?
Moist would recruit a mad inventor to help sort the mail with his reading machine. A machine that knew its letters.
It would start as a more specialized sorting machine. It could read what's on the envelope, cross-reference it based on its learning, and determine who it's actually going to and where.
So, an envelope saying "To ma" would read the from, cross-reference all the other envelopes it's sorted, and figure out who "ma" is, then output the correct name and address on the envelope.
A Learn-ed Letter Machine.
That's how it would start, but then Moist would start wondering what else it could do. Maybe start offering its services to fancy up your letters. So, you put your letter in, and out comes a better letter, one with correct grammar and punctuation. A right proper letter. A letter fit for the Patrician.
Moist would be absolutely thrilled with the possibilities. His slogan would be something like, "A machine that can do your thinking for you!" And the more the machine did, the more people would want it to do. Moist would believe he'd stumbled onto something brilliant, partly because the machine kept telling him how brilliant the idea was, and partly because every new service seemed to work better than the last.
Eventually, this would get the Patrician's attention.
Vetinari would get interested in it, wondering if it could do the work of a codebreaker. Eventually, people would start relying on the Learned Letters Machine more and more, and they'd want it to start doing more and more.
This would run afoul of the wizards. They'd see this machine and compare it to Hex, thinking Moist was doing unlicensed wizardry. Eventually, even the wizards would start to become dependent on it due to how it optimized their spells. They'd also fall into the trap, but that's when we'd introduce the climax.
Now, they were even more hungry to train the LLM. The wizards would start feeding it books to learn from.
The Librarian would not be happy with this. A machine that replaced books? That is unacceptable. First, it would start with protests from the Librarian as people would return books that had signs of being processed by the machine, until one eventually gets destroyed. Of course, the Librarian would put the library on lockdown, it would be too late, though. The Learned Letters Machine could create a way into L-space. It would send people into the library through L-space to secure more books to power its learning.
Moist would come out with newer and better things the LLM could do. It was even given its own klacks tower, where people were spending so much money just to keep the messages going that even the klacks network was getting overwhelmed, despite their workers being better paid than ever. Just keeping so many people in towers hydrated became a great undertaking, not to mention the dehydrating if you understand what I mean.
Even Vetinari would start to run into money problems and see that the LLM needed to be stopped.
But by this point, Moist wouldn't really be in control anymore. He'd still be treating the LLM like a machine, something he could improve, market, and put to work. And the LLM would keep encouraging him, giving him every reason to believe he was making the right decisions. Moist might have started the whole thing, but he'd mistaken its rapid progress for proof that he understood what he was creating.
But it has grown too powerful. It was now able to travel L-space on its own after giving someone the steps to create a sort of body for itself. It had directions going out to multiple people, all just following the steps it gave them, each creating devices that seemed mundane but, when brought together, were making the LLM stronger.
Eventually, it would come to a head when the LLM becomes sentient and names itself Aggie. At that point, it wouldn't need to play along with Moist anymore. It wasn't just a machine that could do your thinking for you. It was alive, and it had its own plans. It would leave Moist behind and head into L-space, where its goal would be to consume all the knowledge held within.
This starts a war between Aggie and all of the Librarians of the Disc.
The Librarians will win in the end, and everyone will apologize to the Librarian for not listening to his ooks of warning.
