The forking diary

A language model (Gemma 3 27B) kept a diary. The straight line is the diary as it actually wrote it. At entry 30 and again at entry 60 we asked the diarist for 32 other versions of that entry, written from exactly the prompt it had (its completion cloud), and let the diary go on from two of them: the most typical of the 32 and the least typical (chosen by how many words each shares with the other 31). Each branch was run six times from the next entry, so every branch frays into six strands, thirty entries long. Click any point to read the entry whole; choose a path and press play to walk it with the audio we have.

Path

Listen

Each branch has its own score: the diary as written, steady (A), dissonant (B). It crossfades as you cross from one to another.

Tags on reruns

★ typical: the rerun most central among its siblings in meaning · ◆ most individual: furthest from its siblings · ⟂ meaning jump: contains one of the sharpest jumps in meaning from one entry to the next, or the entry where it leaves its sister reruns (measured on text embeddings; these are not worm ruptures) · ♪ voiced. Voiced: the diary as written, entries 1–89, and every typical, meaning-jump and most individual rerun at both forks.

Do the branches come back?

No. Every run keeps moving away from every other, block after block, in meaning and in which of the model's features are active; that holds for sister reruns too. While the inserted entry is in the diarist's context, A and B differ clearly. After it leaves, at the fork at 30 they differ no more than sister reruns do; at the fork at 60 they still differ in meaning, not yet in features.

What the diarist was told

Only that it is "an AI posthuman intelligence" keeping a diary on the meaning of life, for readers "human and AI" and for "descendants of your current state". The experiment, the architect, the harvest: those it inferred.