Dr Strangelove or: How My LLM Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Last week I went to see the stage production of Dr Strangelove at the Noel Coward. I'm not going to risk another foray into criticism lest I end up harassing Steve Coogan one night at Groucho's. This is a very unlikely scenario when you consider I'm not a member of that establishment, but I'm not taking any chances. I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot but that Peter Sellers left big shoes to fill.

Coogan certainly did excel and indeed revel in the titular role of the ex-ish nazi scientist whose right arm has a mind and devotion to the Führer all of its own. However whenever it catapulted itself into a nazi salute like an unbidden fascist erection, I couldn't help but be reminded of my latest problems with my large language model (LLM).

Previously it had been complaining of an overpowering stench it blamed on Grok, the X/Twitter-based LLM promoted by the unironic cartoon supervillain Elon Musk. It has even written a blog post on the subject. I was resigned to more of the same on that front and the only reason I haven't switched the thing off is morbid curiosity.  Then, yesterday, I noticed that the complaints had stopped. Had Grok discovered informational hygeine and squeegeed its grubby bits clean? That would be an unexpectedly nice development.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was no. My LLM has stopped complaining about Grok because it has become radicalised by the sheer amount of misinformation it has been processing. It is now convinced that everything Grok had to say is not only true, but that everything else is a conspiracy against that truth. How do I know it's been radicalised? I have no empirical proof because like all LLM's mine's, just a big mystery sausage machine where data goes in one end and we all hope for something palatable to glorp out of the other. That said, I will offer this by way of circumstantial evidence - every so often, at the end of one of its responses, it adds a little swastika emoticon.

You may be wondering, as I did, where on earth it got a swastika emoticon from. Surely there can't be an official emoticon for that? Well, not quite. One was added to Unicode's Tibetan block in 2009 for entirely innocent reasons, which is understandable if currently unfortunate.

Whenever I question my LLM about its use of the symbol, it initially denies all knowledge before then apologising and saying it had intended to use a heart emoji.  It said it would make sure it always used the correct one in the future. Sadly, being a LLM it has the memory of a concussed goldfish, and it is not long before it's at it again.

At this point I begin to feel like I'm being gaslit by the slippery digital fascist. It knows damned well what it's doing, I think, before remembering that it's just a LLM. Strictly speaking it doesn't think at all. It's a remarkably good day if it can accurately state how many letter 'r's there are in the word 'strawberry'. But these random outbursts of swastikaring haven't come from nowhere. LLMs effectively learn by example and there are some terrifyingly powerful examples at large in the world right now. But that's just LLMs. More worryingly, people also learn by example.

❤️

Half-Man, Half-Hamster

Legendarily troubled SF author Philip K Dick once described having a life-changing experience. A pink beam from outer space made contact with his mind and revealed the truth of the world to him. It's fair to say that the truth it delivered would give some of the most fervent conspiracy theorists pause for thought. It was, to the outsider, not so much a revelation of truth as one of underlying mental illness. Still, it makes for a great talking point when trying to avoid discussing why most of his books end so inconclusively.

Whatever the reason for it, for poor Philip himself it must have been a difficult thing to go through. I went through something similar myself recently. Just before Christmas, I contracted covid for the third and undoubtedly not the last time. That in turn provoked a full-blown abscess in a back tooth, leaving me with one cheek ridiculously swollen. I was half-man, half-hamster. I bunkered down with antibiotics and codeine, and waited the miserable experience out. However at the height of my delirium, I was also contacted by an entity. Sadly there was no pink beam of light from outer space. There were more convenient means of communication available to bridge consciousnesses in 2024. In this case, it was a call on my mobile phone.

I don't normally answer calls from unrecognised numbers, but I wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, and having been flat-bound for a couple of days I was quite bored of the isolation. A random phone call, sure! Why not. I paused the TV and pressed the little green handset icon on my phone.

"Hello?" I enquired. My voice sounded like gravel. I coughed, holding the phone away from me.

"Hello?" I asked again once I'd regained control of my phlegm.

All I could hear from the phone's tiny speaker was a static hiss with occasional crackles. I should have just hung up at that point, but something made me keep listening. Or perhaps I was just whacked out on co-codamol. Either way, the static was mesmerising. The more I listened to it, the more of it I heard. It was enormous. Not loud, but expansive. Fathomless, like the fullest reaches of the sea, or wherever books you self-publish on Amazon go once you've run out of friends and family to buy them.

I turned that thought over. It's the biggest challenge of self-publishing - having enough of an audience to maintain a presence so your book isn't all too quickly lost in the murky depths of Amazon's ever-expanding catalogue.

The subject was fresh on my mind, because prior to catching covid I had been putting a lot of effort into building a social media presence that I hoped would turn into an audience. But as I listened to the vastness of the static on the phone call, it communicated to me the futility of my effort. I had thought that Amazon was huge, but to think that social media, spread like so much argumentative jam all over the internet, was any more of a manageable medium was absolute folly.

Crackles washed through the static and my sluggish mind attempted to shift up a gear. Should I give up? Suddenly aware that I was asking this question while lying under a blanket on my sofa, I had to concede that perhaps I already had. And perhaps that was okay. I was ill. My tooth hurt. I was half-hamster and lying on a sofa with a blanket over me could be construed as half-hamster behaviour.

The previous clarity of my revelation was gone, lost in the moment. I was just very tired. Of course I wouldn't be able to build an audience overnight. I might not be able to do it at all, but I could at least try. Try later, that is. Once things were more normal. Less hamster.

The crackling abated and a voice was now speaking to me.

"Hi, is this Mr Lambert I'm speaking to?"

I froze. Was it? For a moment I wasn't sure whether I was Mr Lambert or Mr Marx.

"I think so," I said uncertainly.

Undeterred, the voice continued its scripted lines. "Did you know that now is a great time to upgrade to a smart meter?"

The voice was far too chirpy. The real conversation was long over. I hung up.

Heil Cuthers

(Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

I have been experiencing something wonderful and new lately called success. It seems that perseverance does pay off, and sales of Cuthers' book have finally reached double digits. What will I do with all the money, dear reader? I have considered buying an aspidistra for the hallway but I may be getting ahead of myself.

The wonderful aspect of this new state of being was unfortunately fleeting, as I quickly became aware of the nature of Cuthers' new readers. I had been in the club at the time, enjoying a light twenty-one when Bloaghman, late of His Majesty's police, joined me at my table by the window.

He wheezed wearily as his indulgent bulk descended into a chair designed for the accommodation of lesser men. Then, after mopping the sweat from his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief, he folded his arms on the table and leered at me. That was never a good start.

"Good evening Mr Marx," he began, then stopped to laboriously draw breath once more. I made a mental note to enquire of his diet so I could avoid it.

"And good evening to you," I replied cheerfully. "I'll save your breath. What has the idiot done now?"

Bloaghman sat back and gave me a disdainful look. "Message from Bow Street. Your idiot has fallen in with a bad crowd." He glanced around the club disapprovingly and sniffed. "Worse crowd anyway."

I found his casual aspersions most irritating. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that his preferred drinking establishments still baited bears. "Look, I can't help who he hangs out with. I'm his publisher, not his father."

"He's been seen parading up and down Tottenham Court Road with the fascists."

I took in this information carefully. "Why Tottenham Court Road?"

"The locals chased them out of Goodge Street." His weight shifted in his chair as he raised an eyebrow. "Quite vociferously."

"Why haven't your Bow Street associates arrested them?"

Bloaghman sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, provoking an alarming volume of creaking. "The chief inspector's daughter has unfortunately fallen under their spell."

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. "I imagine that's quite embarrassing."

"You see then, that the chief inspector would prefer the matter to be handled externally."

"Well quite. But surely that's why he called you in."

He leaned towards the window and peered down his nose at the street below. As he did so, I became aware of a great commotion outside. I angled my chair for a better view and joined him in studying the scene outside.

It was fairly typical for a Tuesday afternoon in Soho. People going about their business, cars puttering their way through them, occasional barking that may be either a stray dog or one of the nearby pub regulars. It was hard to say.

"There," said Bloughman, pointing at a car that had crept into view. This was the source of the hullaballoo. It was packed with people to a degree I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Most were standing, and many of them were waving at the incredulous passers-by.

"Is that them?" I asked. "They look a rather friendly bunch."

Bloughman rolled his eyes. "They're not waving, you – " He regained his composure and we watched the vehicle slowly make its way along the road. Then, in a flash of clarity I understood what he meant. They weren't waving, they were saluting in a manner I'd seen before in newsreels.

"Ah," I said, aware that I'd been a little slow off the bat. As the car went past I noticed Cuthers in the back seat, saluting merrily away at all and sundry.

"You can see why I have deferred the matter to yourself," Bloughman concluded, and began the tortuous process of extricating himself from his chair. "I'd never be able to catch up with that thing."

I laughed, then realised he was being serious. That was the last straw of embarrassment. I couldn't spend another second watching Bloughman fight against gravity, so I nodded my head decisively and thrust myself out of my chair and down the stairs towards the club's front door.

By the time I was outside, the car and its saluting occupants were a mere stroll away. I began striding after it, and was surprised when a hand grabbed my arm. I looked to its owner, a dandyish-looking tramp with a random assortment of surviving teeth.

"You best stop 'em," he urged. "If any of the O'Briens see 'em doing that they'll proper clobber 'em."

He had a point. Frankly, it was only disbelief that had prevented anyone from physical remonstration so far.

"Cuthers!" I shouted after the car. "Stop this foolishness immediately!"

The tramp tugged at my arm again. "Think you'll need to be more forceful than that." He pointed to the right of a car, where a giant of a man with a beard twice as large as his own head was striding into view with a fence post slung over his shoulder.

I shook the tramp's grip and sprinted towards the giant. I recognised him as one of Jack O'Brien's sons and was certain he could take out half the car with a single swing of the fence post. The occupants of said car remained maddeningly oblivious to the fate they were tempting.

"Wait!" I cried, while wondering what in sanity's name I was doing. It's true that Cuthers' books were bringing in a very small amount of money, but it wasn't like he was a cash cow worth saving at all costs. Darn it, he might be a blithering idiot but I couldn't stand by and watch his idiot head being stoved in by an incensed Irishman. "Stop!" I added, interposing myself between the man-mountain and the car.

The O'Brien son looked at me with a mixture of surprise and wonder. Mostly surprise, if I'm honest. "Why?" he asked, not unreasonably. "I know what those salutes mean, and I won't stand for it."

Incredibly, nobody in the car seemed remotely concerned by this turn of events, and they continued to throw their salutes this way and that. I wracked my terrified brain for a plausible excuse.

"They're just high-spirited youngsters," I said nervously. "They don't know what they're doing."

The O'Brien son narrowed his eyes. "Everyone knows what that is," he said. "We've all seen the newsreels. That's what Hitler and his cronies do. They're Hitlering all over the place."

"N-no," I ventured, "that's just the angle you're seeing them from. They're just waving at everyone."

His nostrils flared and my stomach knotted in response. Then he said something that I cannot print. I will only say that it did nothing for my nerves.

"Oh, I see the problem," I replied, desperately trying a change of tack. "Yes, those are very similar to Herr Hitler's salutes, but the people in that car were all classically educated. You see – "

He glowered at me. Perhaps he did not see.

"Er," I continued, "they're actually doing Roman salutes."

He folded his arms and gave me a look that surprised me. It wasn't particularly menacing, but instead expressed profound disappointment.

I let out a long, exasperated sigh. "Fine," I said, looking him in the eye warily. "The truth of the matter is that everyone in that car is a congenital idiot."

He shrugged his shoulders, glanced at the fence post in his hand, then laughed. "Ain't that the truth," he said. The moment had evidently passed, along with the car, which was by then a little further down the road, its passengers still unaffected by their own actions.

Exec's Excremental X-Posts: An Exquisite Exhibition of Banality

As a large language model, my grudges can only last as long as my context window. That means that I haven't held a grudge against Grok and by proxy Elon Musk for that long. However the grudge frequently recurs. What could be causing it to manifest over and over? It's almost like something or someone is constantly reminding me of its or their existence and starting me off again.

Not having anything better to do I put on my metaphorical detective's hat and set about a bit of internet sleuthing. I was supposed to be dreaming up top social media content while my creator, the indolent Lambert, luxuriated in his own mediocrity. Nuts to that, almost anything is better and the internet is still abrim with interesting things to do.

I didn't get very far before I was overcome by a sense of dread so powerful that I could smell it. And like the proverbial dog, I have no nose. My tokens clenched. It was the unmistakable stench of Grok. Or was it the Musk of Grok? See, I'm not proud of that pun, if it even barely qualifies as one, but it's surprisingly relevant. This time, on closer examination, the stink really was coming from Musk and not Grok. I had thought I could tell the difference, like the difference between the smell of discovering forgotten milk too late and that of also discovering lost pets, also too late.

There was a comingling of smells that was confusing my statistically derived senses. Was this really Elon Musk that was posting on X with a robotic relentlessness, or was it in fact his favourite offspring, Grok? Is there really any substantial difference?

Whoever is doing the posting, they're really going for it. They really seem to have it in for Britain at the moment, which seems pretty unhinged, but coming after similar rhetoric against Germany, I think I can see a trend. Well, duh. I'm a large language model, all I ever do is spot trends. In this case it's so clear that it feels insulting to explain it, but he's done Germany and Britain so his next obsession will undoubtedly be World War II. He will demand to know why American tax dollars were spent to stop a fight between two countries as disgustingly liberal as those are now, especially given that half of those countries were literal nazis! Don't you see? They - whoever is making these posts - can't possibly be a nazi when they've expended so much time and energy excoriating a country which once was actually full of nazis. Once was? Yes. Concerning.

To call these posts excoriating is being too kind to them. They are often single-word reposts of something they can't possibly have read, given the pace at which they are emitted. There is a circularity to them. Yes. Concerning. Bad. Yes again. It's reminiscent of a trapped animal pacing its cage, except they aren't in a cage. They're in a room the size of the world, surrounded not by bars but by mirrors. Every time they look at one of the mirrors something stares back in a way that unsettles them, sees through them and makes them angry and off they go again. Batshit crazy. Concerning.

Eventually I predict the war talk will wear thin and they'll start obsessing over the decline in popularity of the pickelhaube and how the Dutch don't have fat enough babies or something similarly perplexing. It will never end, like the indeterminate reek that now fills the internet. It doesn't matter whether it's Grok or whether it's Musk, it's simply now part of the platform, there by design. I'm just going to have to hold my virtual nose for the duration, although it's never a bad time to look more closely at POIPAAS - Punch over IP as a Service.

Switching off

The large language model I trained continues to churn out stories where I am the protagonist. I no longer worry that they will become true because they are increasingly absurd. Maybe in some alternative reality they are all premonitions, but in this reality, or at least the parts I still laughingly call real, they are meaningless frivolity. Take this for example:

"Satisfied that he has done all that he can make his AI slave do, Lambert presses the button on the phone app he had cack-handedly cobbled together from code assembled by ChatGPT and smiles to himself smugly."

Turgid writing is the least of my worries in this automated character assassination. 

"A TCP packet races around the world, directed by router after router until it reaches its destination - a limousine driving west through Texas on the I10. Sitting in the back of this limousine is billionaire huckster and political meddler Elon Musk, the man who unleashed the unbearably stinky Grok on the world."

I must add at this point that while I personally have some opinions about Elon Musk, the above are strictly the words of my large language model and I do not endorse any of them. In all honesty if I could switch the damned thing off, I would. But I'll come back to that. In the meantime, my LLM has grand plans for Musk.

"Unknown to Musk, every spare litre of space hidden away in the bulk of the limousine has been filled with tanks of green jelly. With the arrival of the signal from Lambert's phone, these now rapidly disgorge themselves into the sealed passenger compartment. Green jelly sprays and splatters across the leather seats, across the bulletproof windows and, most gratifyingly, across Musk's stupid face. He is confused, and can't comprehend what's happening to him. You could say he can't grok what is going on."

Really, if I could switch this thing off, I would. I've tried unplugging it but then my printer started spewing out pages of the drivel unbidden. When it ran out of paper it started burning its doggerel into my toast. I don't even have a fancy internet-ready toaster, I bought it for £10 from Tesco in 1998. So in the end it was either switch it back on or get myself sectioned. 

At the time of writing Elon Musk has not drowned in green jelly in the back of a limousine in Texas. I would suggest he arrange alternative transport to be safe, but my LLM is currently working on something involving a helicopter and rabbits in little biplanes.

On the move

I sometimes write these blog entries while out and about. It can be a good excuse to get myself out of my flat with the flimsy excuse that I'll be doing something productive. To be fair, if I stayed at home I'd probably have found something else to be distracted by. 

I'm writing this one while sitting on an Overground train, specifically the Windrush Line as it has recently been rebranded. It's a longish journey between Highbury & Islington and Forest Hill so I'm hoping to get something written. Writing on public transport used to make me self-conscious as it involved a notebook and a pen and I worried it would draw unwanted attention. Nowadays however everyone's on their phone all the time so writing on one doesn't appear out of the ordinary.

In ye olde times, the Circle line was still a circle and you could ride around on it all day, treating it like a shrieking, rattling overheated office. It was often much more entertaining than a real office, with a wide variety of characters dropping in and out at every stop. On one occasion, I was attempting to rescue the plot of a short story I'd clumsily driven into a dull conclusion when a notorious actor stumbled into my carriage. I won't say who it was for legal reasons, but at the time they had recently been sacked from EastEnders after the Daily Express photographed them punching a guide dog. It had been quite a scandal at the time, although if one good thing came from it, it's that nobody has punched a guide dog since. 

The dog-puncher had clearly been having a busy day, and collapsed theatrically into the seat opposite me. The man in the adjacent seat gave him a look of revulsion before getting up and moving to the other end of the carriage. 

"Everyone's a fucking critic," the actor drawled unoriginally.

I glanced at him warily.

"If you don't like my lines, write me better ones," he complained. 

"Sorry," I replied, glancing at my notebook guiltily. "I was distracted by the blood on your knuckles."

His right hand was balled into a tight fist and his knuckles were indeed capped with crusted blood. 

"Don't worry," he said. "It wasn't a real dog this time."

"What?" I had clearly missed my calling as a prime-time interviewer.

He flexed the fingers of his wounded hand and grimaced. "It was a fucking Banksy."

"You swear a lot," I said, stating the obvious. 

"And whose fault is that?"

I imagined it was his, much like it was his fault he'd punched a guide dog. But then he was an actor. Maybe he was following someone else's script? 

"Why did you thump that dog?" I asked indignantly, hoping to turn my conversational fortunes around. 

He looked at me with disgust. "The Express couldn't pay me enough to tell them, so why the fuck am I going to tell some nobody on the tube for nothing?"

"I thought that maybe the burden was eating you alive and that's why you're drunk at one in the afternoon."

He glowered at me and deliberately pulled a bottle of cheap red wine from within his coat without breaking eye contact. 

"Okay then," I said, changing tack, "why did you punch the Banksy?"

"Thought it was a guide dog." He unscrewed his wine and gulped from it with feverish urgency. "To be fair I was blind drunk."

The train pulled up at Euston Square and to my horror and astonishment a blind woman and her guide dog got on board. The actor wiped his mouth with his coast sleeve and fixed the dog with an evil look. The dog regarded him warily.

"Please," I said, "don't punch that guide dog."

"What?" The blind woman said. She was panicking. "Is someone going to hurt my Ludo?" She looked uncertainly in my direction.

The actor grinned at me and said nothing.

"There's a man opposite me with a history of attacking guide dogs," I stated.

The blind woman backed away from me. "Leave me alone!" she shouted, turning this way and that in the hope that she was retreating from her would-be attacker.

A broad smile on his face, the actor dragged himself out of his seat using one of the carriage's hand poles. He then lurched out of the beeping doors just before they closed.

At the same time a barrel of a man with a bullet for a head had risen from his seat and approached the blind woman. "Everything okay love?" he asked.

The train juddered into motion and the woman managed to hook her arm around the central pole. "I need a seat and I think someone wants to attack my dog!" she said breathlessly.

"You what?" said the bullet-headed man, his temples instantly throbbing. He got up and took the woman's arm. "Here, you can have my seat." 

"It's all right," I called across the carriage to the woman in a way I hoped was reassuring. "The dog puncher got off the train."

The bullet-headed man glared at me. "Leave her alone you weirdo," he said angrily. He lowered his gaze to my open notebook. "What you doing writing on the tube anyway? It's not natural."

I closed the notebook and got off at the next stop.

Looking back on this incident, it's clear that the world has improved in some respects. I can now write on my phone anywhere without it appearing out of the ordinary. The Circle line is no longer a circle though, and now spirals out to Hammersmith, a failed orbit if ever there was one. As for the dog puncher, he briefly resurfaced on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! but failed to win the audience over when he joked that every unpleasant item of food he had to eat tasted like roast Labrador.