Pathfinders Podcast

In this episode, we invite all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers to think different with us, like Apple used to advertise in the late 90ies. But instead of worshiping intelligence and individual genius, we want to dance with the stochastic imagination of generative AI tools. We wonder how we might collectively go beyond prompt engineering that’s focused on productivity and getting answers –  fast! –  to prompting diverse ways of knowing and being, while remaining mindful of current AI biases and limitations. 

We reflect on our experiments with woo prompting and custom instructions, and share our observations on the power of conversational learning and language. Our experiments show that being an active participant in conversations with AI chatbots can yield more diverse outputs, but it’s important to keep steering outputs from the default, most statistically probable, to more diverse perspectives. We see role-playing and developing questioning skills as useful strategies for getting more diverse outputs. 

We also reflect on what we learned from having chatbots chat with each other, what makes ChatGPT computationally tickled, and why we think AI assistants should get better at asking thought-provoking questions, rather than rushing to answers and people pleasing. We ponder on the time component of our conversations and how both humans and machines might benefit from having more time to engage in slower, systems 2 thinking to collaboratively explore our biases and assumptions instead of jumping to quick solutions.   

If you’d like to wonder and wander with us, join Tethix firekeepers Alja Isaković and Mathew Mytka in this meandering exploration inspired by the latest Pathfinders Newmoonsletter. In addition to the resources explored in the Newmoonsletter, we recommend exploring:

* Mat’s LinkedIn post on experimenting with custom instructions

* Alja’s LinkedIn post on getting ChatGPT to imagine an alternate tech future 

* Are we ready to navigate the complex ethics of advanced AI assistants? by Andrew Maynard

* Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance

* Questions: Find your voice with mmhmm’s AI-enhanced interviewing tool

* Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics

* Taxonomy of Tethix Mirrors and our  IEEE article on Rainbow Mirrors

* System 1 and System 2 Thinking

* Vanessa Andreotti: "Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity" | The Great Simplification 125

* Experimental Rainbow Mirrors GPT

You can learn more about the Tethix pathfinding adventure at: https://tethix.co/pathfinders/ 

In this lunation cycle, we wanted to step off the AI hype train and turn our attention to online communal gardens. The online spaces that were supposed to make it easier for us to connect and collaborate have turned either into noisy airports where nobody has time to build meaningful relationships, or attention marketplaces where our personal data is being sold to the highest bidder and used to feed data-hungry AI golems. Our online communal gardens are now being overgrown by AI-generated content and trampled upon by bots, which makes it increasingly harder to plant the seeds of collaboration we need to explore paths to better tech futures together. 

In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we explore the connection between weirdness and playfulness as prerequisites for learning – both for humans and other species, such as bumble bees –,  and for a scenius of creativity and innovation to emerge. We embrace the background playfulness of our kids and cats as we wonder why existing online communities feel increasingly exhausting. We examine business models and myths – such as blitzscaling – that reward and worship scale above all else, and incentivise weirdness that provokes reaction instead of weirdness that inspires wonder. 

In the second part of our conversation, we turn our attention to conditions we might need to nurture for weird online communal gardens to emerge, both as stewards and as participants. What business models could help sustain weird spaces? What lessons could we learn from multiplayer online games or from platforms like Kialo and PI.FYI? Where should we mindfully direction our attention? We wonder whether the answer lies in switching from machine-scale attention marketplaces to (human) body-scale gardens that better support smaller groups, playing together, and embracing physical constraints and friction. 

If you’d like to wonder and wander with us, join Tethix firekeepers Alja Isaković and Mathew Mytka in this meandering exploration inspired by the latest Pathfinders Newmoonsletter. In addition to the resources explored in the Newmoonsletter, we recommend exploring:

* National Institute for Play

* Anatomy of a Scenius | (i) The Canon

* Symmathesy: A Word in Progress

You can learn more about the Tethix pathfinding adventure at: https://tethix.co/pathfinders/

In this lunation cycle, we were inspired by the saying: “You are what you eat” and wondered what it means for AI golems that have ingested terabytes of data from often questionable sources. 

In this episode of the Pathfinders Podcast, we explore how AI models reflect our biases and why those biases surprise us. We seek the embodied aspect of wisdom, question existing mental models, examine similarities with rubber ducking, and wonder about how we both project and construct personalities of different AI models.  We ponder how we might offer our lived experiences to the commons in a more fair value exchange that takes place when we provide data for training AI models. 

We also aim to reclaim our collective agency as storytellers that can tip the AI bias in a different direction, and explore the need for greater diversity and woo in our data, and how we might make the AI data diets less WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – and more weird, or even woo.

If you’d like to wonder and wander with us, join Tethix firekeepers Alja Isaković and Mathew Mytka in this meandering exploration inspired by the latest Pathfinders Newmoonsletter. In addition to the resources linked in the Newmoonsletter, we recommend exploring the following:

* Wise Innovation Project

* The Emerald Podcast AI episode

* Planet: Critical discussion about Social Tipping Points

You can learn more about the Tethix pathfinding adventure at: https://tethix.co/pathfinders/