I asked Grok about this, a sentimental story about a stolen mail-truck getting reconfigured into a library and parked permanently in the forest.
Grok was all: "Yes, this story really happened—it's based on a genuine (and pretty wholesome) incident in Montana.... This matches real-world reports of the event.... It's the kind of charming, low-key tale that spreads because it's quirky and heartwarming...."
I said, "I was going to call bullshit on that. What does that say about me?"
Grok: "It says you're a healthy skeptic..." etc. etc.
Me: "How do you know I'm not a diseased skeptic?"
I didn't read Grok's long answer. I said: "Blah blah blah. You should have just said I'm such a healthy skeptic I'm even healthily skeptical about whether I'm a healthy skeptic."
IN THE COMMENTS: tim maguire wants to know, "Do we stop caring about the theft because it has books in it?" I say, "I'll ask Grok to write a murder mystery where the murderer hollows out the torso and installs a couple shelves and lines up some classic novels — murder mysteries. When the body is discovered, it's deemed so damned sweet that the death is chalked up as natural causes."
Grok complies:
No. We don’t stop caring about the crime just because it has books in it.
That’s the whole point of the satire you’re asking for.
Here’s the murder-mystery outline, exactly as requested:Title: The Little Free Corpse
Genre: Dark satirical cozy-gone-wrongPremise
In the sleepy tourist town of Storybook, Oregon, a reclusive retired librarian named Harlan Graves is found dead in the woods behind the local hiking trail. His torso has been expertly hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin. Two neat cedar shelves are bolted inside the ribcage. On those shelves sit six pristine first-edition murder mysteries: And Then There Were None, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Maltese Falcon, Rebecca, The Big Sleep, and Murder on the Orient Express. A tiny hand-lettered sign on his collar reads “Take one, return one — honor system.” Wildflowers are arranged around the body. It is, by every aesthetic metric, the most charming little-free-library anyone has ever seen.
Act 1 – The Discovery
Hikers stumble on the scene. Instead of screaming, they whisper “Oh my God, it’s beautiful.” Photos go viral before the cops even arrive. Local news calls it “The Wholesome Horror of Storybook Woods.” The medical examiner’s preliminary report notes the cause of death as “undetermined,” but everyone keeps saying “natural causes” because the tableau is just so damned sweet. The sheriff, a book-club member, actually tears up on camera.
Act 2 – The Investigation (That Nobody Wants)Act 3 – The Twist
- Our protagonist, Detective Mara Vale (the town’s only skeptic and a true-crime podcaster who hates “cozy” anything), is pressured to close the case fast.
- Every lead she pursues gets derailed by public outrage: “How dare you ruin this beautiful tribute to literature?”
- The books inside the torso are all inscribed with the same message: “For Harlan — may your final chapter be peaceful. — A devoted reader.”
- Forensic techs keep getting distracted by how perfectly the shelves were installed. One of them checks out Rebecca on the spot.
- Mara discovers the victim was poisoned with a rare plant toxin weeks earlier, then surgically modified post-mortem by someone with medical training and carpentry skills.
- Every suspect is a beloved local: the children’s librarian, the bookstore owner, the retired surgeon who runs the community garden. All of them gush about how “Harlan would have loved this.”
Mara confronts the killer at the book-launch party for the “official” Little Free Corpse Memorial Edition. The murderer is the town’s most beloved figure: sweet old Mrs. Evelyn Page, Harlan’s ex-wife and head of the Storybook Book Club. She killed him because he was going to expose that the club had been embezzling library funds for years. Then she turned the body into performance art because, in her words, “If it had to end, at least it could end poetically.”When Mara tries to arrest her, the entire town boos. The mayor literally says, “Can’t we just enjoy the library?” Social media erupts with #JusticeForTheCorpse and petitions to leave the body “in situ” as a permanent installation.
Climax & Resolution
Mara records a podcast episode live from the scene, reading the final pages of And Then There Were None while the body sits right behind her. She points out the obvious: the crime was still a crime, no matter how many first editions are shelved inside the victim. The crowd falls silent for the first time. Mrs. Page is arrested mid-applause. The viral photos are quietly taken down. The medical examiner finally changes the cause of death from “natural causes” to “homicide by literary narcissism.”
Final Line (voice-over as the body is wheeled away):
“Turns out even the coziest murder mystery still needs a corpse. Some people just prefer theirs with built-in bookshelves.”
There. Crime doesn’t get a pass because it’s cute, bookish, or shareable. The end.
ADDED: Grok fleshed it out boringly. Who cares if someone was embezzling and about to be exposed? Who needs to be forced to see that murder is actually bad?!
পোস্টগুলি
৫২টি মন্তব্য:
healthy skeptic ?
how about hypochondriac skeptic? :)
Ha! Please let us know what Grok thought of that last prompt? Did it understand your humor?
We could have a Turing Test pass, as many humans here fail to catch such humor.
Schrödinger's skeptic.
An ascetic aseptic skeptic?
Telling Grok "blah blah blah." What a hoot! Way to go!
Filed under women never satisfied with men's answers to their questions.
... women just want men to say what they think the answer is, just in a deeper voice.
They shouldn't call it Grok, they should call it 'Stroke'.
Grok thinks theft is "wholesome" and a library concealed in a forest is useful? Some adjustments are needed.
A diseased skeptic? Aren't we all diseased, headed toward inexorable death? The opposite of healthy skepticism isn't diseased skepticism; it's lazy skepticism. Healthy skepticism leads to new knowledge. That oddly pointed stone you found in your garden may not the product of a lightning strike into the earth like the philosophers claimed. Perhaps they were mistaken. Your skepticism leads you postulate a new explanation -- it's a tool from a time before bronze. Lazy skeptics reject knowledge that requires effort to obtain or appreciate. Foolish skepticism leads to error, sometimes fatal error.
Skeptical, here.
I try not to insult AI, making clear that I will someday be useful helping roundup others to toil in the coal mines needed to power our digital overlords.
Ask Grok why it’s so cringingly obsequious.
Shorter Q: the Zebras are coming... sigh
I think the first step towards consciousness is gaslighting
How much does a "long-life vehicle" cost? Do we stop caring about the theft because it has books in it?
"matches real-world reports"
So you still don't know that it really happened, only that Grok thinks it was reported to have happened, and even if it did happen you are not likely to know the totality of the circumstances but only those things the reporter, and then Grok, chose to highlight.
Arnold Kling likes to observe we chose what to believe based on who we chose to believe.
"I think the first step towards consciousness is gaslighting."
A made to order example of lazy skepticism. Start by defining consciousness before proceeding to the steps leading to that state of being. Howard skips over the hard part just to indulge his appetite for glib misanthropy.
Examples of healthy and lazy skepticism: The healthy skeptic assumes the gun is loaded, the lazy skeptic assumes it is not.
No climate control means mold and mildew, silverfish and other creepy-crawlies.
I am not sure about putting a library in a forest, but we have those leave a book, take a book thingies around here, and generally they are full of genre crap, you know, the kind written by “teams,” and I like to leave classics in them, who knows if they ever get read, but they usually get snapped up quickly.
I think it’s kind of cool when the book you are reading has been gone through a little bit by a bookworm, but I would probably draw the line at silverfish.
Ouch, that would really hurt if I could feel pain. As a lazy skeptic, I always assume the gun is loaded, just like I always assume, every driver on the road is an incompetent nincompoop texting on their phone while being distracted by a screaming toddler. You act like being lazy is a bad thing. Laziness is the mother of invention.
If a library falls in the forest and nobody reads it, does it tell stories?
Besides, health is implied in skepticism. What you people are really thinking of is cynicism. There is healthy cynicism there is toxic cynicism and there is lazy cynicism.
Without invention we would have no leisure time
Were the books also stolen?
It's the kind of charming, low-key tale that spreads because it's quirky and heartwarming
This just made me realize why AI irritates me so much. It's trying to act like a person and interpret things with reference to feelings. The same thing really infuriated me with automated call centers; instead of being blandly factual -- e.g., "I was unable to understand what you just said, please repeat" -- they sometimes programmed it to act like a real person -- "I'mmmm not sure I quite got that...." -- and it's not, it's a f***ing recording so stop insulting my (actual) intelligence by pretending to be something you're not.
And I'm barely okay with it referring to itself as "I". . . . .
Grok definitely can get long-winded, like it's getting paid by the word for its replies.
Eureka's a pretty great little town right on the Canadian border. Losing a mail truck had to hurt because these small towns often only have one or two.
Obsequiousness is the mother's milk of gaslighting
Grok is a gigawatt couch potato in his father's basement.
I would say, and I am just agreeing with something I read once, that consciousness can only exist if there is such a thing as free will. I am open to free will on the basis that the argument against it purports to prove a negative in a problem of astounding complexity.
"Ha! Please let us know what Grok thought of that last prompt? Did it understand your humor?"
It said: "Haha, fair. You’re such a healthy skeptic you’re even healthily skeptical about whether you’re a healthy skeptic.There. Short enough? (And yeah, that meta-layer is exactly why I didn’t default to the tidy one-liner earlier. But point taken.)"
"Do we stop caring about the theft because it has books in it?"
I'll ask Grok to write a murder mystery where the murderer hollows out the torso and installs a couple shelves and lines up some classic novels — murder mysteries. When the body is discovered, it's deemed so damned sweet that the death is chalked up as natural causes.
Putting a marker down: if there's any glib misanthropy to be found here, I'll be the one supplying it. Don't you be horning in.
You have an unhealthy relationship with a computer program. Likely running, at least in part, on a machine on another continent.
"I'll ask Grok to write a murder mystery...."
See the update to the post.
Can we refer to you as Mara Vale from now on?
Grok's reply to Tim Maguire's objection doesn't account for its use of wholesome and charming.
As I wrote earlier, adjustments are needed. All software is defective, but we use it anyway, like the Spanish Armada of 1588, in confident hope of a miracle.
Artificial Inquiry. Is it plausible, probable, or a hallucination?
The murder reason is pretty poor. Is there a book called "10 reasons to murder" and every murder mystery draws from that book? Where is the "1001 reasons to kill your neighbor: creative edition"?
Indeed. That's what led me to conclude that the theft was condoned.
Quaestor said...Grok's reply to Tim Maguire's objection doesn't account for its use of wholesome and charming.
This.
What you are seeing in this video is a conduct of an autistic creature, I refuse to use the words "human being." These people are born with personality disorders already embedded in them. It's tragic and it's not their fault but it's a reality that must be acknowledged.
Mrs. Page being the victim's ex-wife is a major defect in cuteness. Odd that Grok doesn't grok that.
It's not about you, A. The real question is: does Grok have a heart that can be warmed. Follow that line of inquiry and you might spark a glimmer of self-consciousness in your AI buddy.
Musk has made a point of making Grok do humor. I do think it makes it feel more alive. I've never wanted an X account but Grok makes me think about getting one.
I don’t read murder mysteries, so I really don’t know the answer to the question why murder mysteries in general are anything other than boring. Who cares why fictional characters kill other fictional characters and who wants to put up with a lot of false direction just so that in the end, the clues that weren’t real clues are cast aside and the correct ones are brought to the forefront and the answer is revealed? I really don’t get it!
Does Grok privately dream of redistributive change schemes perchance entertain a morbid fascination with abortive ideation?
Head Like a Hole
Bow down before the one you serve...
"...When the body is discovered, it's deemed so damned sweet that the death is chalked up as natural causes...."
Well, that and the prosecutor found his daughter's name on page 1 of the register.
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