psychological exploration with LLMs
dialectical storytelling as the ideal approach for mapping archetypes
this blog was born out of a night spent on edible lvl highs; i had the munchies for creative expression. the following post was written that night, in quite a lazy writing style.
the predbrain substack will mostly be about my predictive brain theory, which has been boiling in my head for a while. it encompasses depth psychology, neuroscience and computational learning and should give an interpretation to psychic experiences with predictions and solutions to neurotic states of mind. i’m just a jungian neuroengineer; my ideas come from places that i’m too ignorant to fully uncover. regardless, i see their value in their beauty, humor and occasional practical utility.
let’s psychomeasure users by making them write stories. give them a subject to write a fairy tale, a fictional story on. then have an LLM characterize archetypes present in the story, and how the user portrays them, to shed light on repressed, unknown, biased aspects of the personal archetypes.
story initiation: user can prompt a story style like ‘goth dinosaur apocalypse’.
AI sets up the story, generates images for illustration involving archetypes of interest. the AI actually selects what archetypes to explore according to prior knowledge it has of the user. it introduces the characters in an ‘active learning’ fashion, covering the space of archetypes to characterize what the user's relationship to kinds of people are.
when exploring subjective archetypes: build a tree of archetypes starting from child -> mother -> (princess, whore), father -> (hero, king, ...); expand, recursively on more and more detailed archetypes and symbols.
describe the story setup to the user that the user builds on. a situation is described, e.g. a wednesday shooting in a church, and the user has to choose who gets to be shot. the LLM continues from there and drive a story in alternation with the user.
the AI should show positive/dark sides of an archetype and its uses in life, depending on which aspect is seemingly repressed/biased in the subject. it’s all about reducing bias and deepening understanding.
we visualize everything, user gets to create and watch a story. while getting psychologically analyzed the shit out of.
most cracked, dopamine milking way to do this is by creating a fast paced story building conversation with an LLM. you alternate with it, building the story in sequence. you can give comments to the AI, like [stan falls in love with handy], marking such comments as separate from the story events, while the LLM can also break the fourth wall saying some shit like "stan ended his realtionship with his chief addiction [sorry i couldn't let him fall like that :( ] <eos nig>"
we use the idea that wrong predictions in social situations, by failed, biased understanding of certain archetypes (clusters, kinds of people), is the sole source of our suffering. we developed large part of the psyche to predict behavior of other people well, because of the dominating complexity of interpersonal relations in the human life.
the users here predict the actions of their archetype projections, the bias of which can be then best uncovered.
as we map the subjective archetype constellations, the LLM keeps giving subtle nudges to the biased characters actions and motives to show the user how such people may act and why, driving understanding, centering the bias.
krokodil donedeal 🤝