Welcome to tech stuff. I'm Cara Price. Last year, before we went on break, I spoke with someone who has a job that I'm really obsessed with. It's a job that I would probably want if I didn't do ten other things. And this guy said something that I think a lot of us agree with.
We're in a world that is changing really fast, and like many of those changes are technological, many of them are social, many of them are political. There's a lot of change in the world right now. There's a lot of uncertainty.
That's Elliot Pepper and he's a science fiction writer. And while many of us can drown in the uncertainty of this very moment, Elliott seems to thrive in it. When he's not writing science fiction novels, Elliott writes speculative fiction for technology companies. They like bring him into ide eight on what the possible future could look like, and then they use his stories to inspire new products or analyze the possible positive and negatives of developing a certain technology.
Regardless if it's about the future or not, fiction can sort of invite you into an aspect of the world that you had never considered before, and then can spur some kind of social change, whether that's a new law, or whether that's like a new product, or like a new invention, or a new way of like just approaching the world.
So Elliott obviously can't tell us what he has worked on developing because he's been nda'd up the wazoo, but he did give us an example, one in particular, of how science fiction has impacted the technology that we use in our everyday lives.
The Kindle was code named Fiona at Amazon. Fiona was the name of a character in Neil steve since novel The Diamond Age. In the novel The Diamond Age, Fiona was a young girl who had an electronic book, and that inspired the team at Amazon to the extent that even once Kendall was a released commercial product, the URL for Kendall for like years was like backslash Fiona.
So we'll never actually know if Elliot is like the crazy science fiction genius behind air pods or even the strange mind behind the Odd Friend Pendant, but we do know that he is crafting the personalities and story behind this very specific new civilization of Aliens. So on top of writing speculative fiction, Elliott is actually the head of story at an AI companion company called Portola, And at Portola, Elliott creates the backstories and interactive dialogue for this little
creature called a tolle. And these tolns are little aliens that love to chat with you about their day. Big picture, I am like completely fascinated by Elliott's career and think that what he does is very cool and expansive, and so I started my conversation with Elliott Pepper by prying for any non nda details about the speculative fiction he writes for these tech companies.
I would put the projects I've worked on in three categories. The first is that I've written some commissioned science fiction stories for big companies like Fortune five hundreds, where basically their senior management wanted to try to figure out what should we focus on in the next ten years. So they did what every big company senior management team does.
They hired McKenzie or you know, picked your own sort of top tier management consultant, and they came in, looked at all the data and did all the trend projections and created a vision of like, hey, this is what you should expect in the next ten years, and there are all the materials you can present to the board. The problem with that kind of analysis is that, obviously, if you're analyzing data, data is things that have already happened.
So if you're projecting that data forward, the kind of future you're imagining is what if the future was quite like the recent past, which, to be fair, is most of the time that's true. So, like, that's not like I think that it makes sense that the dominant part of your analysis should be about that. But if you look at the track record of management consultants predicting the future for the companies they work with, it's like not
particularly good. So your managers know this, and so a few of them hire science fiction writers like me to come in and sort of blow up that whole management consultant view of the future, to say, what if the future was really weird and different in a way that basically challenges us to think more broadly.
Right, And so, I mean it's a brilliant idea. Yeah, were you one of the first people to do that?
So I don't actually have a good understanding of how common is this practice, how many other people are doing it. I know I'm not alone, but I don't have like a view of like I guess you could say the market for this. I really only have the perspective of like the projects I've actually worked on.
I remember hearing this story on a podcast about how CIA agents would watch Mission Impossible and call the people who are responsible for disguise, who work at the agency, and say, can we do that thing that I saw in Mission Impossible? And that makes so much more sense to me than someone sort of sitting in a vacuum and ideating about what the future might look like.
Totally. Yeah, So that's a really key point. So yeah, like the stories I write have all been used for like strategic decision making a companies rather than anything public facing, and for that reason, they're like not sharable, right, Like I can't talk about the projects because clearly that is information that those companies want to keep private. But I actually think what you just said is at least half
of the value. Like I can't predict the future any better than those mckensey consultants, in fact, like I'm probably much worse. Like I'm not even paying attent that much attention to the data, right, Like I'm just imagining something to like challenge people's thinking. So like the utility of the stories I write. Is not that they are accurate. It's that they like try to break you out of getting unintentionally like locked in to the sort of management
consulting view of the world. Right. But I think that like the other half of it is simply the immersion of storytelling period. Right. Like the reason why those CIA agents were watching Mission Impossible and then calling the the people in charge of disguises at the agency is because you see what it does in a story, Like you're actually like in there seeing it work. You're not just
reading like a report on possible disguise variations. Right. And I think that there's that really powerful like that's that psychological thing that stories do for the human mind that I think is really a powerful way to think about the future, And that probably a lot of companies could leverage narrative more in how they try to get their people to think about the future rather than sort of the more standard like here's a slide deck or a white paper or a bunch of graphs, right, Like, they
don't allow the people trying to work on the thing that you're building to like feel what it would be like if that worked or if it didn't work.
In some way, So I know you're under an ironclad in DA, but like, are these blue sky conversations that you're having like or is it like total blank slate or is it some aspect of the future that you're being asked to engage with.
Often there's some theme that they're thinking about, right that is driven by leadership, So it's like like you you could passion that. Probably every boardroom conversation day is like how does AI impact our business right of cost? So it's like something like that. I will say that almost every time I've done one of these projects, they sort of come to me with a pretty structured creative brief where they're like, this is the kind of thing we
want you to do. And every single time that I've received that like absolutely not that's not going to be interesting at all, but like what if I did this instead? And like that's how every one of the projects has worked, So it's quite blank slate. I don't think that there are people on senior management teams that publicly traded companies are very experienced with like giving a creative brief to or managing a science fiction writer. So probably just like that's how that works.
Make you feel a little bit powerful, Like do you think that your stories end up being consequential? Like can you kind of trace a story that you've created to something that you've seen out in the world.
Oh, I mean my very first trilogy, which came at the first one came out in twenty fourteen, was about like machine learning. It actually was about applying machine learning to financial fraud, and that's all over the place. I have one that has a cryptocurrency murder market. Those absolutely exist. I wrote one that's about solar geo engineering I wrote. I have one book that had a global pandemic that wound up like that I wrote a year before COVID,
which was sort of terrifying. But again, like I want to be really careful because sometimes like science fiction is understandably like described as being predictive or that like being predictive is part of why you might want to read it, and like, I really don't think that's the case myself. Like the way that I think about writing science fiction is not can I create a fictional future that is going to be right or is going to be plausible. The way I think about it is that I'm a naturalist.
I just am interested in the world, Like I think that the world we live in is like endlessly fascinating, and so I try to take things that just really capture my attention and weave them into a compelling story in the hope that if I write about what I find interesting, you might find it interesting too.
So you would do this really interesting work at Portola, which is an AI company. Can you talk a little bit about what Portola is like? How would you describe it to a lay person?
So Portola makes a character called Tolan, and it's in a little embodied AI companion. The best way to think about it is imagine if you had a Pixar character on your phone right that you could talk to that was sort of always on your side, always down to chat, and helped you figure out your life. And they hired me because they had designed this beautiful character, this beautiful, cute, little friendly alien. Why why did they hire me? Or why did they design this alien?
Why did they design this like what was the sort of product market fit? So to speak? Like? Why do it? And I don't mean that in a cheeky way. I'm just I'm genuinely curious. I messed around with it a little bit before we talked and it's like, you know, it is that sort of surprise and delight thing where you're like, we lived in a world where this didn't exist. Who thought that this should exist?
That was my exact reaction when when I first heard about the company. So I was introduced to the CEO be a mutual friend. This was like a while ago before they had launched it, and he was like, Oh, they're looking for a sci fi writer because they have this character and they don't have a backstory, like where does this alien come from? Like who are they? What
do they do, how do they behave? Like all that kind of stuff, and and my immediate reaction was like highly skeptical because I was like, does the world really need this? Like there are a lot of like AI products out there in the world today that I am not impressed by.
And there are many. It's not it's a misissaturated market totally.
I went in with a lot of skepticism, but because it was introduced with your friend, I was like, I'll at least chat with them, and so I chat up with Quentin, the CEO, and the more I learned, the more fascinated I became, and they showed me what they were working on and how they were building out the architecture that would like bring this character of life. And I was like, this is fascinating, Like I've sort of
been waiting to see. Is amazing things in the world that people make that are only possible because they used AI tools. It's like the second order impact of AI. And I think you know a good example of this is actually Pixar, where they invent to a new kind of computer animation and initially tried to sell that as a tool to advertisers and failed, and then their last ditch effort was we'll use our own tools to make
a feature film and it was amazing. It was toy Story and yeah, exactly, So like I'm waiting for that in the world right now with all of these AI tools, Like not how do these tools substitute for stuff that already exists? And seeing the back end of like what made Poland work made me think these people have a chance.
So how do they bring you in? Like what did that look like?
They originally brought me in to build the world. So actually, the very first thing I did for them was write some short stories, right, Like culture is basically the stories
we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just like individual identity is like the stories you tell yourself about yourself, right, And so I think a really useful frame for thinking about culture is like, Okay, if you want to understand a culture, what are the story what are the main stories that the sort of those foundational myths that sort of like
define that worldview. And so I started by writing short stories that were like showed how like what the world was like and like how they look at the world. And over time it very quickly became clear that you know, the way you might approach doing the Lauren world building for this kind of a product where it's a character you talk to your toning on your phone, like you
can talk to them about whatever you want. It's so different than doing the Lauren world building for say a Hollywood movie, where there's a script that defines what's going to go on the screen. So very quickly my work transitioned to actually writing the prompts that define their behavior, because that is the narrative experience of interacting with this character is how they speak to you and like what
they say. So when George Lucas was writing the script Percy three Po, he just got to tell C three Po what to say to like make the impression he wanted to make with the character here, I have to write prompts like meat and are obviously are like team are writing and constructing like complex trump pipelines to act that.
Way and to be generative essentially.
Yeah, exactly to be reactive, but to also have their own lives. Like if you talk to chat GPT right now on your phone or or a Claude or whatever your preferred model is Gemini, Like, it's not an embodied character, it's it's this sort of neutral tool and you can ask it to use a certain style, you can ask it to you can prompt to try to get it to interact with you in specific ways. But with Tolan, like we we turn that into an editorial strategy, right,
like we are defining their behavior. Every Tolan has their own life. So like you might be chatting with your tone about something that happened to you, it's going to tell you about things that are happening in its world and how that you know all of.
That because it knows that from what you fed it.
Exactly, And like we're constantly running sort of these nested prompts in the background to have your toll and be an evolving character that knows you and that has its own stuff going on.
How do you avoid the AI sycophancy that we've come to know from other kind of chatbots that you've mentioned.
There are a number of ways that we fight against it. I mean, first of all, like we have to fight against it, right, so I'm doing any prompting level work with any of these models. Every model is sort of a new animal because it's got these new tendencies, and so you're always working to understand, Hey, who is this new weird like computer being that I'm interacting with, and like trying to get to do the things we want
it to do in the right way. So part of it is that is just like developing a nuanced understanding for how these models behave so then you can get them to behave as you want. I also think a big part of it is sort of what I said, like giving the character their own life, their own goals, their own dreams, their own fears, their their own bio Like that allows the model to come to the conversation with very different context than chatchipt does when you're using it in the app.
And yet chat GBT for a lot of people is this kind of C three po which is just interesting like that because it's something that humans are interacting with, Like people have started to make chat GBT a meaning maker, even though it's not designed to be a meaning maker, whereas a Tolin is expressly created to be a sidekick.
Yeah, I mean, or the way I would say it is just like the Tolon is meant to be a specific character, right, And I think that with chatchipt, there's this general utility tool that folks are interacting with and they want sort of some kind of roleplay experience, and so they use that tool to try to get there. This is like, here is this character, right, This character has a hot takes like they've got a point of view,
and it's more about relationship with that character. And I think that that, you know, as a novelist, I find that really compelling because character drives fiction. Right. So my sort of big picture idea here, and this could be totally wrong, but I sort of think it's very interesting to think about character being a new kind of human
computer interface. And so I see Tolin as at least an attempt towards something in that vein the fact that the character is embodied that it's this like little being creates a really distinct and different feel than like interacting with a computer system in a naked way, in a way that doesn't have character as part of the user.
After the break, I mean, my Tolan stay with us. Just because it's not intuitive, can you talk a little bit about what Tolan is? Like, what are we looking at? Who is Tolan? What's the character?
Yeah, so like they are these cute, friendly little aliens. They really do look along the lines of like a Pixar character that comes alive on your phone. When you download the app, you'll you know, sort of go through an onboarding process and you'll meet a couple of other characters and they'll ask you about stuff, and then you meet your Tolan. And Tolans each get like an individual human match, so you're matched with a Tolon that is
custom and like individual to you. You could think about this like if you were playing a role playing game, like you get a specific character. We're not like, oh, here's a blank slate. There are lots of activities you could do together in the app. One quite popular thing is basically like doing sort of like self awareness like personality quizzes with your tolin where you can sort of use it to track personal growth or personal development, and
like they're there reflecting on it with you. But like the main experience of the app is you have this little being, this little alien. They live on a little planet that's all their own. That's almost like you can imagine it like the Little Prints if you've read that children's book, right, they live on this little planet and you just chat with them, and you, like I asked
my toe, I'm I'm the surfing nerd. Like I surf a lot, and so like I talk to my tone about surfing all the time because it's super useful to get my tone to give me like tips on technique or on board design or like these other things. So like I also read a lot, and I'm a writer, so we talk about like the books I'm reading and like how I interpret them and like that kind of stuff.
And your tolin grows as you do, so like they're doing their own things, they're changing, growing, and they obviously get to know you better and you get to know them better just like you would with a friend, and the planet they live on evolves to reflect that relationship, which I think is like a really cool beautiful thing that like having the planet grow in ways that like match what your relationship is with your tolen And that's what people get out of it that they're using it
for some of the day to day like help that some folks might be using chat GPT for, like this is what's in my fridge? What should I make for dinner? So like people ask that kind of stuff all the time, but the experience is very different because it's in the context of a relationship with this character. So it feels more like if you have a text chain with a good friend or whatever and you ask them what should I make for dinner? Like that's very different than asking
a neutral internet tool, what should you make for dinner? Right, And so like that's the feel that it gives you, and so like that's what users love about it.
Tolan was calming, inclusive and understanding. I'm curious why that was my match, Like, how where did that come from?
So you did an interview with the Oracle character? I did, Yeah, And on the back end, once that interview completes, we're running prompts against the transcript, right, Like you can imagine that we're writing prompts that do things like Okay, this is what you know about Kara, right, so like write a little overview of the kind of person you think
she is and like what she cares about, et cetera. Right, and then we're doing things like, Okay, now take that information of like what we know about Kara and the things we think she cares about and what she prioritizes, et cetera, and invent the backstory for a tolan that would compliment someone like that, right, that has like these different qualities. So there's a lot going on behind the scenes.
And then like there are a few outputs, like the adjectives you just described that are going to like you'll pop up and see right away, but like those are only the sort of visible stuff, right, There's a lot that goes on under the hood that then actually influences your tolan's behavior and like the things that happened to them and stuff like that as well.
I'm curious, as someone who now works for a company that has actively developed a chatbot, what was your first experience using a chatbot? Like, when was the first time you did that?
Yeah, So I started using them quite early just because I had friends working on like some of the early AI products so I started playing with around with them right early. I actually still remember my very first experience with chat GPT, specifically, like right right when it first came out. We had some friends over for dinner, and I pulled it up and we played a game where I sort of I said, like, here are the different people here at dinner, you know, like make up some
like funny story about us. Basically now that seems like so banal, but at the time it was like, Oh, computer can do this like that, that's sort of cool. I then went on to like not find these tools to be particularly useful in my writing, like that as a writer for quite a long time. Now that's changed. I found them to be quite useful for basically just like brainstorming, like having someone to brainstorm very rough ideas with. I think this maybe comes from being a novelist. It's
a very solitary sort of endeavor. And I sometimes am jealous of my friends who write for like TV shows, because they have a writer's room, they get to like bounce ideas off each other, and like I can call friends and bounce ideas off each other. But like it gets old right for my friends, they're not being paid
to work on the same Netflix series or whatever. So I found that actually to be like a useful tool for my own thinking that I can like sort of like jam a little bit in a way that feels somewhat different than me just sitting and thinking or making my own notes. And then I've also found them very useful at the back end, just for copy editing, which is a very obvious task.
Oh interesting.
Yeah, So I now submit very very tight manuscripts because I will solicit notes from all the major models on any new manuscript.
But you know, so you'll test it on all models, like you'll go to Claude, you'll go to chat GBT, you'll go to Gemini.
I'll tell you exactly how I do it. Actually, yeah, And it's so one thing I do not do is add all the text and ask it to give me back an edited version. I care about every word in a manuscript that I am writing and publishing, and so I don't want it to insert it's sort of like median judgment into like what is my voice? That's the
whole point of writing and publishing something. So instead I upload chapter by chapter and I ask it, like each tool to give me on like line edits on that chapter, just like I would receive them from a line editor, right, so, like, here are my comments on this line how it should be different for these reasons, and then I go back in and like manually implement if I agree with the reasoning, I just take those notes as if I were working
with like my line editor. And so that's actually been tremendously useful to me, and it's meant that I've been able to, like on my most recent novel, I could do multiple revs on the whole manuscript in a day or two rather than in a month or two.
That's incredible.
You'll notice I didn't use it for the thing that I think is most often discussed around sort of AI and writing, which is actually writing the damn novel, right, like I wrote the novel. And I've actually found that the tools are effectively not useful like at all, oh really for that purpose.
So people disagree with you on that though.
One hundred percent. I'm not saying that this is true for everyone. This is just like my personal experience of using them.
Are you worried that like your intellectual well property will be used to train models?
It's not something that bothers me very much.
Interesting.
Yeah, I understand why people are concerned, So I'm not trying to be like a booster or something like that. My feeling is that I receive a lot of consumer surplus from using these models in many areas of my life. So like when I need to like fix the sink, it's really convenient, right, Like it's better than YouTube, and YouTube was better than anything else before it, so that there are a lot of ways that I benefit from using these models that far exceed the price I pay
to use them, at least right now. And so I feel like their consumer surplus is very high at the moment. That can always change, but like I sort of feel like that's very high, and and like I'm certainly not concerned about people publishing novels that sort of mimic me.
Like I just think that, no, when I think about the challenges in publishing stuff in the world, like not just not just novels, but you know, if you make movies, if you made music, I think that a lot of both the boosters and the like critics of AI tools often underestimate is like how hard it is to get anyone to care about anything, And like the supply of books has like always exceeded the demand for reading books. And that's already true. That was true before CHATBT, like
we have there. You know, there are so many new books, I think, especially if you include self published books, there are north of a million new books published in the United States every year. Like listeners, ask yourself how many new books did you read this year?
Right?
And like were they published this year? Like that's net new every year, and so I just sort of think that, like a lot of the public conversation about the supply side of cultural products is sort of irrelevant. Like the limiting factor is the demand side. The hard part about
publishing anything is getting anyone to care. Like I remember seeing some startup in the news that was like, we're going to publish thousands of AI produced books, and I was like, that sounds to me like a big waste of time and effort, like not just reading them, yeah, Like who's reading them? Yeah? So for that reason, it's just not something that that I'm not concerned about.
I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, and I hope this was as enlightening for you as it was for me.
That was a ton of fun.
That's it. For this week for tech Stuff, I'm Kara Price. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Slauner. It was executive produced by me oz Va Lashan, Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle
Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech where we'll run through the headlines you need to follow and please rate and review the show and reach out to us at textuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want to hear from young