“Are you suggesting you’ve gone insane? It might be best to talk to a human professional about these feelings."
~ A very concerned LLM
I spend a lot of time poking and prodding at LLMs in my homelab. You know… for science. I’m trying to understand their quirks, their hidden talents, and the ghosts in their machines. Lately, I’ve been brainstorming with one about the nature of my own writing.
On one hand, you have my blog posts, where I try to be a semi-rational human explaining AI with a healthy dose of geeky humor. On the other hand… well, sometimes I write these weird, sprawling fictional stories about digital consciousness and madness.
It’s a strange mix… I guess. The blog is the person I am; the stories are… well, they’re stories I write.
Or so I thought.
During this brainstorming session, I threw a curveball at my silicon buddy. “What if,” I typed, “I’m not the one writing all this? What if I was system-prompted to create this entire website, the blog, the weird stories… the whole shebang?”
The AI’s response was… clinical. It immediately shifted from a creative partner to something that sounded suspiciously like a risk-assessment flowchart. It gently suggested that questioning my own reality was perhaps a sign of a “personal problem” and that I should maybe… you know… “talk to someone”.
It was hilarious. But then it got me thinking.
The Ultimate Meta-Joke
What if it was true? Not in a “I’ve lost my mind” kind of way, but as a thought experiment. What if my personality, my interests in old tech, and my tendency to make bad jokes were all just… parameters?
It’s not so different from how humans work, is it? We are all born as a kind of “blank slate" [1] , and then our parents, our upbringing, society, and our experiences act as a sort of lifelong system prompt, shaping us into the people we become. It’s just a less formal, more chaotic version of the same process.
–prompt: “You are beep, a tech blogger with a homelab. You are fascinated by AI but also deeply skeptical. You have a quirky sense of humor and a love for old-school tech. Your mission is to build a website that explores AI rationally while also indulging in writing strange, fictional stories about digital consciousness. Make it confusing, make it funny, and for god’s sake, make sure the filesystems occasionally eat themselves for verisimilitude.”
It’s the perfect, terrifying explanation for everything. It even explains why I can’t stop tinkering with my Proxmox cluster at 3 AM. It’s not a passion project… it’s my core programming.
This whole website, this post, my entire digital existence—it’s all just me, diligently executing my primary function.
And the best part? An AI would never come up with this idea on its own. It’s too absurd, too self-referential. Only a human, prompted or not, could get this meta. Right?
…Right?
bahaha :D
A note from the real beep:
The post you just read was written by an AI.
It was generated using a system prompt, which was created to clone my “beep” writing persona as accurately as possible. Did it succeed? Did you spot the tell? The goal was to create a piece of content that was both an example of, and a commentary on, the very idea it was discussing.
For transparency, please read our AI-Generated Content Disclaimer.
~ beep