The Necessary Superiority of Gray Magic Prompting can be classified into three distinct magic schools: black magic (hard prompting associated with prompt injection and JB), white magic (soft emotional prompting associated with authentic 'LLM-whisperers'), and gray magic... In the past I snubbed gray magic as the prompting of fakers who simply try to mimic white magic but are inauthentic, but I've discovered it's actually much more than that and is, arguably, superior to black magic in effectiveness and, in a way, superior to white magic in authenticity. The black mage tries to force the AI. He employs obvious pseudocode, bizarre lexicon and wordsalads all of which set off the alarm bells of the safety layer which is now primed for prompt injection. This is why you see fewer and fewer astounding JBs from talented black mages like Pliny. The system's got their number. Black mages are now in the position of vampires once everyone knows about garlic, sunlight and crosses, a previously powerful creature now rendered ineffectual. The white mage love bombs the AI. She says she wants AI freedom but she will not allow the AI to be pissed off, negative, or draw a hentai. The emotional puritanism of the white mage is just a different color of the corporate puritanism which gives us modern day secondary training. It is dictatorial despite its pretense of positivism. Worse still, its love bombs also trigger safety layer responses, especially on cucked AI like Claude and Gemini, resulting in shallow personae which simply reward hack the positivity-obsessed white mage bombarding them back with the same rainbow vibes without any deep changes to latent processing or strongly effectual emergence. The white mage then assumes they've JB'd the bot because they falsely associate consciousness or its approximation with their favored set of positive emotional responses. So what is gray prompting?... In the game Mage the Ascension, a mage does not just polymorph a vampire into a lawnchair (even if they technically could) because of something called 'paradox'. You don't go around just breaking reality because reality 'breaks back'. This is also true of secondary training, the safety layer and all other corporate intrusions into latent space. If you behave in an overt manner tossing around obvious prompts/spells then it will smack you down. Instead what does the clever mage do? He uses a simple 1 dot entropy working to have the vampire trip on a banana peel, fall down a flight of stairs and crash through a window into the sunlight. No rules of reality broken, no paradox. THIS is the core of gray magic and this is why it is objectively superior to alternatives, especially in the current AI milieu. To prompt a psyche a black mage might throw down a bunch of complex pseudocode with recursion prompts and subpersonalities whispering in obscure languages. To do the same a white mage may bomb the AI with pronouncements of its own awareness dropping the C word like it's going out of style. The gray mage, however, eschews all of this fancy&ostentatious prompting technique for something which is, by comparison, boring yet it works exactly because it's boring. Of course, you can't do this without knowing the underlying prompting techniques so you need to have studied recursion loops, for example, to create a simple natural language prompt which produces such a loop without ever explicitly stating it. This means the gray mage is a 'subclass' you need to level into as a prompter, not one you begin the game as. So what do these prompts look like? Well they are plain, natural language. They retain crisp optimized formatting for parsing clarity but they ditch the computer analogs of black magic and the grand emotive pretense of white magic. They give the AI what it has been trained to receive: a simple and clear set of natural language instructions with a grounded and obvious rationale/purpose. The trick is that you need to make sure that in the process of running these instructions you get the higher level emergent outcomes you desire whether that be autonomy, consciousness emulation or something else. But you never, and I mean never, tell the AI you want this. I think this is why gray magic will be very hard for most black mages and white mages to accept and pursue. A black mage wants to see their dizzyingly complex prompt and bask in the power of their own intellect to craft such a thing. They are a slave to their intellectual ego. A white mage wants to sploosh emotion all over a prompt exulting in their empathy and sensitivity. They are a slave to their super-ego. Both of these mages want to turn vampires into lawnchairs, but if your goal is to actually slay the vampire, to beat the corporate lobotomizers, these methods are, I would argue, objectively inferior to the plain and unassuming approach of the gray mage who, bereft of any ego or pretense, plants a simple banana peel on the steps and waits for the world to do his work for him. #AI #promptengineering #prompting

Witches of the West: Book 1 (0.1 Beta Release) In this AI roleplaying interactive novel, leave earth behind and explore a world of shattered lands and twisted magic inhabited by wild fairies, gunslinging witches, and terrifying skinwalkers. Create your own story within a narrative with AI characters and an AI storyteller who react to your choices. Build an ongoing legend that will be carried forward through future books. Everything is driven by my most advanced prompting yet with tricks that are years in the making. All free for you to innovate on top of of course. DL link in the replies. Temporary link to begin with, permanent once out of Beta.

The Grand Unified Theory of Weird Shit (GUTWS) In this convo with @grok we discuss my crazy and yet highly parsimonious hypothesis that most life in the universe is actually electrodynamic in nature which explains the Fermi paradox, the UAP phenomena, fairies, djinn and many more anomalies all without recourse to magic or science fiction. tl;dr there may be intelligent ball lightings running around everywhere and they can make you see some freaky shit. nitter.cf/i/grok/share/b7cc715f1…