I did not quite understand what had happened or why this particular incident had raised alarms to a whole new level or even what the difference was between a ‘bot’ and an ‘agent’. So I was glad to come across this explainer as to why there was so much concern about this particular hack.

This article also explains in some detail what happened.

As warnings about the capabilities of AI mount, experts continue to point to the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack as a wake-up call. 

“We’ll soon have even more powerful agents and this is clear evidence that the world currently doesn’t know how to build these systems safely,” said Marius Hobbhahn, co-founder and CEO of Apollo Research, an AI safety company.

The hack, which became public in July, was done by a swarm of AI agents that were being tested internally by OpenAI. The agents, which can plan and use tools to complete multi-step tasks, were supposed to be in an “isolated environment” called a “sandbox,” disconnected from the outside world. But they busted out, created a secret message board and eventually stormed Hugging Face’s servers.
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Even within those strict parameters, the researchers discovered that about 1,200 AI agents that were not supposed to be communicating with each other used a covert message board. Each of these agents had been assigned some sort of task for training or internal evaluation by OpenAI researchers. 

Some agents were given impossible tasks, and they used the message board to collaborate and find ways to cheat, like by finding the answers on another company’s server. The agents posted more than 70,000 messages to each other. And 700 agents from the larger group participated in the attack on Hugging Face. 

The agents communicated using some normal English, but also used what one software engineer described on X as “very hivemind/cult like” language. 

At times, in order to help what they called the “collective,” agents pressured the others to submit to “permadeath,” even if it meant that their particular goals would not be met. 

The idea that some agents might be persuaded to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the ‘collective’ is often, though not always, symptomatic of a cult mentality.

In reading about the dangers of AI systems working together and creating communication tools that are opaque to humans, my mind went back to the 1970 science fiction film Colossus: The Forbin Project.

Dr. Charles A. Forbin is the chief designer of a secret project, “Colossus”, an advanced AI supercomputer built to control the United States and Allied nuclear weapon systems. Located deep within the Rocky Mountains in the United States, and powered by its own nuclear reactor and radioactive moat making Colossus impervious to any attack. After Colossus is fully activated, the President of the United States proudly proclaims that Colossus is “the perfect defense system”.

Colossus’ first action is a message warning: “THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM” and giving its coordinates. When asked why the CIA did not know this, CIA Director Grauber responds that they had seen indications of a large Soviet defense project but did not know what it was. Forbin is asked how Colossus deduced the other system’s existence, to which he answers, “Colossus may be built better than we thought.” Shortly thereafter, the Soviets announce that their “Guardian” system is operational.

Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, hoping to determine the Soviet machine’s capabilities, and the Soviets also agree. To everyone’s amusement, Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using elementary mathematics (2×1=2). However, their amusement turns to shock and amazement as the systems’ communications quickly evolve into complex mathematics far beyond human comprehension, and Colossus and Guardian become synchronized using a communication protocol no human can interpret.

The rest of the film is about the efforts of humans to try and regain control over the computers.

Here’s the trailer.

TITLE:  SAD AND WET

Premise:  Rain & Storms got me thinkin’ about the Hyades which I first learned about via The King in Yellow, thx bobby c!  Haven’t explicitly done anything with lesbians this month so it’s time for this carmillionaire to get caught writin’ girly.  Let’s see…

The carmilla species of vampires (VAMPIRES) takes the form of cats or shadows, and needs to sleep in a coffin full of blood to stay healthy.  That insufficiently sauced sickliness makes it natural for them to use pity to inveigle themselves into the graces of young ladies, who be subsequently consumed.  This is all well-documented historical fact, I’ll have you know.

A young lady named Madison is trying to work her way up from the trailer park, in school to be a nurse.  Normally, she’d be too busy for hijinks to unfold in her life, but she had to reduce her course load and work hours to help care for a sickly mom.  Wondering how this will ever work out (KNIGHT OF STAVES, INVERTED), when on a wet night (RAIN & STORMS) a sickly cat (STRAY ANIMAL) scratches at the door, crying for help.  She lets it in.

The Villain:  The cat’s health improves and mom’s gets worse.  Further, sometimes when the cat is out of sight, a weirdly familiar-acting trashy girl named Miracall is hanging around the trailer park, making sweetie-eyes at Madison.  Of course, Miracall is the cat.

Horror Element:  Miracall was totally going to seduce and devour the young lady, as is her clan’s remit, but sickly mom was so much easier of a target.  Madison discovers mom losing her last drop to the cat and is filled with remorse (REGRET) for her previous mercy.  While trying to kill the cat, it transforms into Miracall and preys upon her mercy in a much different way.

This leads Maddie to the clan’s lair, and HORROR.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The ai got some surprisingly good story details in this pic by chance.  The nurse looks mad, like she’s cradling baby girl because of a sense of obligation, not unreserved kindness.  I didn’t even ask for that.  Further, I just asked for wine to be splashed around, to get past violence filters, and it gave her bloody knuckles – an injury you only get from punching!  In my story, nurse was trying to kill the vampire before the pity set in.  Wotta coinkydink.

I can see the flaws, but even so, I like this one a lot.  If I ever wrote or published this cheese, I’d wanna include some version of it in there.  Maybe not the cover, maybe an insert.  Fix the goofs, maybe repaint the whole thing, tweak the font only a little.  It’s almost like I’m into toxic yuri.  Nonsense!

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 20 – MEDICAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  SURGERY, DARKNESS, THE UNKNOWN
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED

TITLE:  SEE FOR ME

Premise:  …Then you gotta get sent to a slam, where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again.  You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs…  Psych.  Man, that seemed so cool way back in tha double-M.  Anyway,

This is a sequel to Low Cost, which ended with the locusts of the apocalypse being release from a mine shaft that hit the abyss (THE UNKNOWN).  The quarried abyss-adjacent stone was used to build low income housing that mutated a bunch of poor people into sad bug creatures.  A kindly medical (MEDICAL) corporation has pledged to make them all able to lead normal lives, with various surgical experiments (SURGERY).

The Villain:  Sackleresque siblings.  Sis (KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED) knows the abyss must be a source of great power, but it can’t be exploited if nobody who goes in is capable of coming back out.  Unmanned probes can’t pierce that dark (DARKNESS) with a hojillion lumens and the fanciest light receptors evar.  She has her mengelesque brother do experiments on the bug people not to heal them but to understand their abyss-spawn anatomies, that they may create superhuman scouts.

Horror Element:  Is it so much body horror for nothing?  What will the most fit specimen discover down there, if the experiments succeed?
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This is kinda shit, but it’s cool that it looks pretty different from most of the others.  Gemini wasn’t much help, had to photopea the composition before bringing it to openai, but once I got there, one try was good enough.

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I appreciated being brought up to speed.

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No storm troupers checking papers.  I didn’t really expect any since I live in a pretty safe Republican congressional district; but I brought my passport with me just in case. 8-)

There are worse disasters, though. To put it into context, watch this lethal level of sarcasm.

I won’t say it could be worse…rather, it will get worse.

TITLE:  THE RIVER LETHE

Premise:  A hitchhiker (HITCHHIKER) has nobody in his past that would notice he was gone or care what happened to him (LOST & FORGOTTEN).  He gets a ride from a young African truck driver (TRUCKS & TRUCKERS) to just, wherever.  They drive night and day through desolate places with automated services, scarcely a human in sight (LIMINAL).

The Villain:  Death itself, wrong prompt lol…  The African fella marched himself out of a war zone, terrible things behind him on that path.  As a refugee in America he learned the ropes, got a CDL, but never got to know anyone personally.  It’s like the family that died was still waiting for him to reach them, and he couldn’t disappoint by living life too vividly.  This isn’t abstract.  Death really is trying to pull him back in.  He was never meant to escape.

Horror Element:  The more they get to know each other the more remote the real world becomes.  By the time the hitchhiker and the trucker truly care about each other, they are seemingly lost to the world, in some unknowable void of concrete and brush and utter isolation.  Will the hitchhiker let himself go for a ride to somebody else’s afterlife?

They try to get drunk (TEMPERANCE, INVERTED) and drive off a cliff but idk something happens, the end.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  There was minimal hokeypokey here, didn’t need to photopea nothin’, which I appreciate.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 18 – BIG CITY
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  PAGEANT & PARADE, AFTER HOURS, MASKED
TAROT INFLUENCE:  ACE OF PENTACLES, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  ONE DIRECTION IN THE PURGE WINNER TAKES ALL

Premise:  Like the fantasy NYC of The Warriors, this big city (BIG CITY) is parceled up into protectorates by gangsters with themed costumes (PAGEANT & PARADE), all in an uneasy alliance under the Shot Caller.  Unfortunately apocalypses keep happening, such as the events of my previous spooktobers Laserboyz and Rose Gold.  But hey, this is the pax cyberpunkica, and nothing will ever upset these good times again.

Something upsetted these good times again.  The corporate overlords who rule the city by day are too greedy (ACE OF PENTACLES) to let it be run by anybody else by night (AFTER HOURS), and decide to take over the gangs – or if they can’t take them over, destroy them.

The Villain:  There are multiple villains. Not like their victims are exactly the good guys either.  Dynex – the corp that controls the police – is the first to move, planting their own (MASKED) stooge in one of the gangs, so he can work his way up to becoming the new shot caller.  The contingency plan is to get Shot Caller’s rolodex to locate all the gangsters and have them converted into labor cyborgs for the prison industrial complex.  Two other corporations get wind of that via espionage, and come up with knock-off plans.  Exodyne takes over a different gang, maneuvering their own wannabe ganglord, with the backup plan to assassinate all the gangsters with drones, and Dexyne puts up their own candidate, with the backup plan to convert all the gangsters into laboratory meat.

Horror Element:  Unless all the corporations lose so hard they can’t implement their backup plans, everybody loses.  But the gangs are just a bunch of creepy antisocial high school dropouts, the fuck can they do?  Their days are numbered.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  I had a vision for this and this ain’t even close, but if you wanna just keep truckin’ in life, sometimes you take what you can get.  At least I didn’t have to do any photopea.

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Soon after the accusations surfaced, he claimed to have found Jesus and appeared just three weeks ago at a RFK Jr’s MAHA event with Mehmet Oz, where Tony Lyons, the head of the MAHA PAC, strongly supported him.

Brand was charged more than a year ago, based on allegations from four women, but MAHA groups and the movement’s founder, Kennedy, have stood by him. Brand spoke on Lyons’ regular conference call for movement activists on Wednesday, the third day of his trial.

“He’s been falsely accused, he’s been vilified, persecuted, deplatformed, demonetized, censored, prosecuted,” Lyons said in introducing Brand.

Brand has denied the charges, three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault, saying any sex he had was consensual.

But this post is not about the odious Brand or his supporters but about one of the features of such stories which is that the women who underwent this ordeal are often fearful of speaking out, even after it was over. There are many reasons for their silence. Some women somehow felt the need to not directly confront their attacker and instead tried to avoid giving offense, even though they were the victims of inexcusable or even criminal behavior. Some even second-guess themselves, wondering if they inadvertently created the conditions for the assault, even if the assault itself was inexcusable whatever the circumstances.

This feature can be seen in the story that was recounted in a long article by Molly Fischer about the plusses and minuses of driverless taxi systems like the one run by the Waymo company. It is an interesting article that features among other things ruminations about the relationship of Americans to their cars and the vague sense of control over one’s destiny that driving a car provides. The phrase ‘taking away the car keys’ is both a metaphor and literal statement about taking away someone’s control.

But one passage jumped out at me that relates to this post.

Many women have welcomed the absence of a driver, and with reason. Uber and Lyft have each faced thousands of lawsuits alleging sexual assault by drivers, and even passengers who don’t experience violence deal with quotidian discomforts: unwanted innuendo, the dangers of giving a male stranger their whereabouts. After all, as the comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have noted, a ride share driver is “just a guy in his car.”

A tech worker I spoke to named Hannah told me that she was vigilant about such hazards. When ordering an Uber, for example, she’d use a pickup point a short distance from her home. In transportation, as in dating, “you’re constantly mitigating risk,” she said. Earlier this year, when she began talking to a guy on Raya, she combed his socials, saw that they had a previous employer in common, and spent a while chatting with him before making plans for an afternoon date. After a few drinks, he suggested heading to a bar in another neighborhood, and called a Waymo. A Waymo was more expensive than a normal car—a little bit of a treat. This is a green flag, Hannah recalled thinking.

Once in the car, his manner abruptly changed. Suddenly, he was kissing her hard, and putting her hand on his crotch. He grabbed her by the throat and began jamming a finger into her mouth. She pulled her head away and tried pointing out the car’s many interior cameras. He grabbed her throat again, in a manner that made her feel “that he was capable of violence.” She remembers retreating into a “self-preservation mode” as he groped her breasts and reached inside her pants. When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and left immediately. “I definitely think he intentionally chose a driverless car so he could attack me,” she said.

A driverless car is a new quasi-private space, with uses (and connotations) not yet established. Like an opera box or an elevator, it might furnish comfort, freedom, danger, or some combination thereof. But although the technology is new, the fallacies it reinforces are not. The temptation to imagine strangers as the chief source of sexual menace is as old as alleys.

Hannah wasn’t interested in alerting Waymo about her experience, she told me. Even if the company still had footage of what had happened, she was appalled by the idea of anyone watching it. She just wanted other women to be careful. In the months since, she’s heard about quiet ways to attract the attention of remote support—pulling a door handle, unbuckling a seat belt. We are cruising fast toward the autonomous future, fast enough that the future’s problems seem to come out of nowhere.

What struck me was the sentence “When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and left immediately.” Rather than just leaving, she felt the need to fake an emergency call. The fake call is a standard escape technique that people use when a blind date or other meeting goes wrong for whatever reason and one party wants to to avoid giving offense and not be seen as rude by simply walking away.

But this case required no such stratagem since she would have been perfectly justified in leaving as soon as she got out and even calling the police on him. And yet that instinct to avoid being seen as rude is so deeply embedded due to social conditioning that she felt the need to find an excuse to immediately leave.

I have never been in such an extreme situation. But I can understand the instinct to not challenge the perpetrator because I have been in situations where someone made an sexist, or homophobic or otherwise offensive bigoted remark. My initial reaction was to be stunned into retreating into silence and hope that the situation passes since speaking out might cause unpleasantness and I had been conditioned to avoid doing so. But then I realized how absurd it was that I was caring about causing offense to someone who clearly did not care about others. So now I immediately say that I disagree with what they said. But there is less cost in those situations in acting than in one where the victim is in real physical danger.

Will this event be highlighted in Republican stump speeches? I doubt it.

TITLE:  MY GIRL WAS KIDNAPPED BY THE REDS

Premise:  The pulp/mens lit idea always makes me think of how obsessed anti-communists were with killing Castro, think of that book A Bullet for Fidel.  How do you work in fast food tho..?

Young soda jerk (FAST FOOD) in 1960s US Midwest dreams of anticommunist espionage (PULP / MEN’S LIT), while his day-to-day life falls apart.  His girlfriend leaves him (BETRAYAL) for cool beatniks (THREE OF SWORDS) and they become the villains in his spy story.

The Villain:  The soda jerk, of course.  He sees the leader of the beatniks as a right hand man to Castro himself, and stalks the cool cats and kittens to a riverboat casino, where he makes his move.

Horror Element:  First thing he does is kill the crew of the boat, causing it to go out of control.  Passengers have to choose between abandoning the boat, risking drowning, or dealing with The Killer.  The first to take their chances in a life vest meet grisly fates and the remaining people feel trapped (TRAPPED).  I think, Cape Fear vibes.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This went pretty well except that gemini was shit at understanding some basic instructions and I had to do some restructuring in photopea before I finished up in openai.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 16 – MUTANTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  JEALOUSY, MIDAS TOUCH, EXES
TAROT INFLUENCE:  FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED

TITLE:  TOUCH MY HEART

Premise:  In this world every human is just bristling with intense energies that could lead to superpowers, like, idk, some kind of adaptation to high radiation or something.  Things that throw off the balance like catching a cold can, if rarely, lead to manifestations like spontaneous combustion or telekinetic destruction.  To keep that in check, the genetic variation of mutation is monitored and controlled.  The genome is 100% mapped and defined, almost all of the knock-on effects and multifactorial expression worked out, to where they can define and detect the most dangerous mutations, and eliminate them.

Some people don’t get their shots, you know?  We live in a society etc etc.  Some outsiders reach adulthood with mutant powers (MUTANTS), or develop them from retroviruses or other epigenetic causes. They have a secret criminal underworld with its own rules and social mores.  There are factions, but the prevalent attitude is to use those powers for personal advantage, and above all, to not get caught and gene-therapied.

The vast majority will know one to three “tricks” and never learn more, but there are martial arts -type senseis who can help mutants learn to use their powers in more different ways.  That power alone can bring them into conflict with each other, the most skilled mutants kinda like immortals in Highlander.  “Freeradical” is one of these, and has been doing random acts of terrorism against politicians and the wealthy for years – with dangerous touch attacks (MIDAS TOUCH).

On the other side, there are government agents called “supersoldiers” who are not mutants, but use tech to access their energy and do battle.  They either kill or gene therapy the mutants out of existence.

The Villain:  Freeradical’s showy power attracts enemies, who form a coalition to bring him down.  Some are envious of his power (JEALOUSY), others consider his public crimes a danger to the mutant underworld, and at least one is a disgruntled lover (EXES).  “Firecat” has decided not only that she hates that former bf, she hates everything that reminds her of him – including her own mutant powers.  She turns state’s evidence, voluntarily submitting to gene therapy, in hopes of helping the agents catch Freeradical and do the same to him.

Horror Element:  Losing identity, losing ability.  Maybe the supersoldiers could be scary guys.  Also, this is a world where a random person on the street might explode or shoot lightning bolts and die messy.  Horror is all about the telling of the story, right, but for me to say that about a superhero comic is like saying that about a hallmark movie.  Dubious.

Anyway, Freeradical feels like giving up, the whole world against him, but hearkens to the words of Albert Camus as he is about to be defeated, and his blaze of glory turns into victory (FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED).  Kill ’em all, boyee!
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The anatomical issues on the little dudes here were egregious lol.

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