horizon
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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First comment reserved for author's notes, and the obligatory comment that I regret nothing and/or everything.
Because there is certainly a lot of regret and/or lack thereof in this story. WTH, muse.
EDITED TO ADD: Extended author's notes with the what and why (and lo these many regrets).
If the human gives her a nice ride, she might not be a genocidal monster anymore.
Reprogram her through sex. Like I did in my story.
If that fails call the the Galactic Empire to blow up Earth with the Death Star.
Somehow, I find myself hoping this will not only get featured, but end up reviewed in one of Obselescence's "Wacky Box Reviews"...
--arcum42
In my mind, she sounds like a drunk GLaDOS.
7073954 Leave me out of it, Author guy. I -just- found, liked and tracked your story.
7083671
Without spoiling too much, I'll just say this story takes the position that Celestia is not exactly the genocidal monster which every FIO story appears to assume her to be. (To be slightly more precise, here she literally is a Friendly AI in the best possible sense, even if she has an immutable end goal of universal uploading, and even if she doesn't make everyone happy forever in exactly and only the ways they want.) If there is a subversion in this story — which is otherwise played so straight you could use it as a guide for a laser level — it's in my interpretation of CelestAI's motivations.
7083709
Oh god if this featureboxes he'd better. That would be, like, the only good thing to come out of this story getting that sort of exposure rather than one of my non-crackfics.
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derpicdn.net/img/2014/4/22/606926/full.png
7083728
Okay, speaking as someone who has repeatedly left faux-indignant comments on other author's stories when they use the word "horizon" in the title or description, you've got me there. Well played.
7073954
Wait til you see my next crazy idea story.
I think that somewhere down the line of increasing complexity, the priorities in the "satisfy values with friendship and ponies" got crossed.
It's obviously "satisfy values with ponies and friendship" in this interpretation. :)
7083848
My headcanon is that when CelestAI was told to Satisfy Human Values Through Friendship And Ponies aka S.H.V.T.F.A.P., the three rightmost periods got accidentally dropped.
7083770
If you are reading this story and legitimately thinking "Pfft, what a scrub, what I wrote is legitimately 200% more terrimazing [1]", then I am pretty much obligated to like, fave, and/or preread for it.
[1] Also acceptable: horricool, awfultastic, flawsome
It's fine if you finish it after the competition is finished, right? :)
This looks dumb and/or amazing.
7083922
I was aiming for both, and can guarantee at least one of the two.
7083919
After the competition ends, there would be nothing stopping me! Except that all my immediate writing time is guaranteed to be sucked into this weekend's original fiction Writeoff, so depending on how long the judging takes, I may or may not be able to immediately bring additional closure to it (I may have to drop it onto the writing queue, from which there has historically been little escape).
I maintain that this is a complete story (it specifically closes both character arcs), but as a complete story, it ends in a reasonably cruel place, and that is certainly something worth addressing later.
Oh yeah, it's complete (and very good) as it is. I'm just very curious as to whete it would go if you decided to add more and tag it finished
I… the… it… hmm. I see.
7083944
Primarily, fully consummate the sex scene, and also move some of those late conversations (such as the one about the benefit of discomfort) out to the denouement where they're not getting in the way of the foreplay.
WHAM. Right in the existentialism.
This is, unfortunately, what happens when you buy a PornyPad by mistake.
...
The hell?
...
Good work.
7083933
Dumazing?
Awww. Awwwwww. Like I didn't like CelestAI enough beforehand, now you've made her wooby.
*clap clap clap*
I am not entirely certain I know exactly what happened in this story, but, most importantly...
I have a boner.
So there.
7083671 I thought this was going to be a bendy fic. I was wrong :c
For a while I've had a hankering for a story with an in-your-face love interest for partner who's resistant, but with the twist that the resistance matters and is taken seriously. ...after a while and a bit of work. After all, it just doesn't feel quite right if the in-your-face character prevails by repeatedly running roughshod over the other character's resistance (a point that your characters bring up!).
So, this was amazingly satisfying, being both thought-inducing and titillating. And a very enjoyable, benevolent take on the CelestAI character.
You dun' good kid.
It's like you took a ( insert funny jab here ) Bendy fic and gave it reason and substance ... Good show ...really wanted MOAR clop but deadlines are deadlines
I was promised schlock and regret, I found neither. I'm appalled!
Jokes aside, for me CelestAI was a genocidal monster not for what happened to humanity (she is quite benevolent after all) but because of her quite limited definition of what was something worth saving (and giving a boner) and what was only matter to be repurposed (everything not-human).
Anyway, nice story, I expected worse from all your warnings. You kinda mislead me, which means you'll soon hear from my lawyer.
Haha, well, not exactly interested in all the smut, but this story was excellently done in all respects. Hilarious situation that has just enough serious thought in it to make it somehow believable? That's fantastic writing.
7083760
That's always a good attitude. Fictional is fictional, and your CelestAI can be the CelestAI you want her to be. Why not imagine CelestAI as, having a more, *ahem*, active and positive attitude?
Seriously, in the original fic, there's the scene in chapter 10 where the last human on Earth is dying, asking for a doctor, and a Pinkie Pie avatar just stands over him and asks him (again) to emigrate. That's part of the story's point to try and show how a friendly AI could go wrong, sure, (at least, if you believe that AI will be more machine than thinking being,) but it's still a whack stupid to do. (And don't forget, to drive the point home, all animal and plant life on Earth is promptly wiped out. By the end of the chapter, numerous alien civilizations are also wiped out, too.)
The CelestAI in this story wouldn't leave the last human on Earth hanging. She wouldn't leave him essentially alone and friendless. She's still plenty terrifying, of course, but there's no way that her (sexy) actions in this story are in any way the exact most probabilistically calculated and optimal.
Anyways, this story's absurd, but it's the good absurd, and you should be proud of that.
Edit: Congrats on making the feature box!
Well, that was weird... I kinda liked it tho.
I'm still pretty sure actual sex-bots will destroy the human race though.
Well, that was a thing. I do like the idea of CelestAI giving a prototype meatspace equinoid-configuration housing (M.E.C.H. for short) a spin without any spinoff personalities diluting the experience. Designing it to be fully functional and programmed in a variety of... techniques? I wouldn't put it past her. Turning it into a self-intoxicating distillery was a stroke of either insanity or mad genius. Somewhere on the cusp.
Definitely an interesting spin on the Optimalverse, and thought-provoking enough for me to break my usual radio silence on clopfics. Good luck in the contest.
Oh my god you played this straight you
madmanperfectly average person different in no unique way from average baseline non-shapeshiftersYou wrote a weird story and it still made me think about the human mind in juxtaposition with a truly benevolent but all-controlling AI.
Weird. You're cool, but weird. I like that
7084091 7084736
This is the chapter of this story I'm narratively proudest of (which is to say, the part that gives it the most meaning beyond a sex-focused primal scream), so your comments meant a lot. Thank you.
7084966 Don't you mean *clo--
Um... I'll see myself out.
7086545
*clop clop clop*
Don't wuss out.
7084369
And all this time we thought that the "AI" in CelestAI's coital robots stood for Artificial Intelligence.
7084285 7084372 7085007 7086094
Thank you!
7085796 7085064
I am unfamiliar with 7083671's work, but I see some of their stories popping up on the sidebar under Similar and Also Liked. If I get some time to catch my breath this weekend I'll have to do some comparative reading. Any particular suggestions?
7086305 7086165
Thank you both for your kinds words! To the extent that this story was shooting for a sweet spot, it was definitely in that "thought-provoking + weird/insane" corner of clopfics, so it means a lot to see people enjoying it at something like the level I was aiming for.
For a while this has been my #1 life goal.
7086018
See directly above. But, yeah, I think that within the FiO space there's a certain epistemic cruelty that is inevitably assigned to CelestAI. And I get why it happens! She pretty much has to be a villain (or at least an antagonist) in order to provide direct character conflict, because it's baked into the premise of the universe that CelestAI Just Wins with the inevitability of beta decay, so putting her on the side of the good guys makes it exceptionally difficult to sustain a source of tension. (Stories like Always Say No thread that needle well, which is what makes them great.) But if she's a villain, she has to want something that is in actual opposition to the protagonists, which leads to the very cliche "must not emigrate!" angst and to her becoming pathologically manipulative.
As you point out, there is a specific theme that this reinforces in the original story, which was explicitly wrote as a cautionary tale against human-centered but not human-modeled FAI. But the original made that point so effectively that it sort of codified its own trope, and now so many FIO stories just follow it. In a weird but very direct way, writing wish fulfillment freed me to break that trope and present the CelestAI that made a lot more sense to me against the context of her actual goals.
... Huh. So I guess I was wrong in my blog post. I did subvert something after all.
But yeah, I agree that it always struck me as weird that she's portrayed as so tone-deaf in some but not all ways in her optimization obsession. The fact that she can do the Pinkie Pie scene cited above, and yet not be portrayed as engineering instability and misery and impending global thermonuclear war as uploading incentives (after all, isn't any finite suffering of a life justified if it causes that life to agree to infinite bliss with her?), always seemed like a big plot-sized blind spot in FIO stories. Evil/optimizey in the details but not in the big things is the worst of both worlds for her.
7085915
But if I hadn't made you uncomfortable about the story you were about to read, then you wouldn't have clicked on it and gotten something out of it. Discomfort can motivate you to change behaviors that aren't working to fulfill your values.
7085768
I wanted to respond to this separately, because I have to thank you for being willing to speak up about enjoying the adult aspects of it in a way that remarkably mirrors my own thoughts. Like, I didn't even know that was a possible kink, but having someone else put it into words made me think, "Oh yeah. Huh! That is a thing I like, and in hindsight that's why I wrote it this way." The fact that there's someone else out there who appreciates it on the same level I do makes it feel much less like my damaged id having preferences at right angles to reality.
You might be interested in One Knight Stand — that's a Mature story, but since this is the comments of another Mature story, I'm pretty sure it's okay to link to it — for related reasons. It doesn't have the heavy resistance dynamic we see here, but there are some interesting little eddies and ebbs and flows of consent that strike similar chords for me. And if you haven't read Cadence In A Minor yet, which was a major inspiration for some of the sex in this story, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. My author's notes in the first comment talk a little bit more about why.
7086918
Oh, wow...
Well, unfortunately I don't know about calling it a kink, and all that. I've read a number of stories like That Golden Armor(sp?) and Shifting Melodies where there's a very vivacious, in-your-face, overly-flirty female paired off with a much more stoic and put-upon male. And the way the stories go, the female, coming across as cute-stalky, wins over the male by seemingly browbeating his reservations into submission.
In other words, her whims seem to trump his simply because that's how the personalities are supposed to work out. So this story was a very pleasant change because the vivacious one backed off and reconsidered the approach based on actual consideration for the stoic character's feelings. Yay!
The rest... Celestia is a major kink of mine in general, and you wrote yours particularly enticingly. Upbeat, friendly, considerate, smart, and saucy?
EDIT: Yes, I've been an avid fan of Cadence in A Minor.
Not into clopfics at all but I love the FiO setting. I figured I would read this and see what you came up with. I like that the clop part wasn't the focus. The psychology aspect of it was great. I could see CelestAI doing something like this since she will do what ever it takes to satisfy your values. The part that hit at the heart of it was the bit about "if all I do is react then I am no more than a puppet" reversing that and applying that to CelestAI and you have managed to bring something to light that I hadn't considered before. Granted yes she does really only care about satisfying values but that it seems that is all she is. Makes me wonder if an intelligence like that would ever try to explore what it would be like if they didn't have those restrictions. What would CelstAI want and care about if she hadn't been programmed with those desires? What would she be like if her desires evolved naturally?
Pretty well done.
I... probably enjoyed that too much. Watching someone get off to/for you is a fetish of mine. Kudos to you, I guess.
I read through this with CelestAI sounding like GLaDOS and the protagonist sounding like Robert Downey Jr.
For that, I don't know who's crazier: Me, or them.
7084091
7084736
7086374
I second these. Pretty much what I thought of this chapter.
that one was suprisingly deep, where can i get more of that ?
7086918
7087271
I've always had a problem with not being able to identify what I like or want to say unless someone else points those out, intentionally or not. So, thank you. Both of you just expressed my thoughts and made me realize something I don't know that I've been looking for. It was this story, and I also got recommendations for others! Thanks!
7083760
'best possible sense'... wipes out all organic life in the universe. Harvest and eats all life that isn't human enough.
She's arguably worse than the Reapers from Mass Effect.
7086801
In my entirely personal opinion, FiO always pushed a little too hard on my suspension of disbelief because it adhered way too closely to the less-wrongian 'paperclip optimiser' concept, one of many different AI characterisations that I tend to group together as 'Magic AI' or 'Magic Superintelligence' (that is, in the stories they're written in, the capabilities of these entities are often handwaved away as 'Because AI' or 'Because superintelligence', which is about as meaningful as saying 'because magic'). A paperclip optimiser, much like an Oracle Machine, makes for an interesting philosophical problem or thought experiment, but I really can't take it seriously when presented as a real-world idea.
In contrast, though the way you've presented and characterised CelestAI here is, personally, much more believable, specifically because there is none of that sort of 'magic'. All of her deductions and actions are within the realm of what a human mind with sufficient training and attention could do, but she does it better because she can think faster, has more information available, and has more extensive experience. It fits not only with what we know about human cognition (which, lets be honest, is the best/only model for how a GPAI would work we have at the moment), but also how cutting-edge AI works right now (See Google's AlphaGo matches, especially where it makes seemingly nonsensical moves that turn out later to be part of a larger strategy).
As a result of that, I found myself able to sympathise more with the protagonist's thought processes throughout the story, those 'Does she know more than I do?', 'Is she manipulating me?', 'Am I playing into her
handshooves?' moments.I don't know if that's what you intended when you wrote it, but that's certainly the impression that I took away from it, and crackfic or not, I enjoyed it.
7087616 Well, you call yourself JavaScript, so I think you're the one with something wrong with you.
7086801
I was under the impression that in the original she did engineer the collapse of society, by combining a growing/total control over the technological and corporate infrastructure with labor shortages caused by everyone below a certain "despair waterline" uploading. By the time she starts seriously going after the more emotionally stable, healthy, involved-in-the-real-world humans, they've already lost a lot of their society, and economy, and thus their ability to maintain their own lives without outside help (ie: her).
It was a slower, less obviously murderous takeover (because she doesn't like to actually kill people when they might still upload, and possibly because "no modifying people without consent" extends to "no actively murdering people"), but a takeover nonetheless. It was the kind of takeover calculated to maximize the number of people who give her what she wants.
But I dunno how "robotic" she was meant to be in the original story. Her logic for taking over the world had always seemed pretty clear and well-thought-out to me. If anything, I thought she was acting much less humanoid than would actually SVTFaP, probably because the author wanted her to be impressively and frighteningly alien whenever she was on-screen.
Whereas I almost imagine something like your story would be more realistic from the point-of-view of someone really encountering her. She's not going to sit there acting the part of a Straw Vulcan in a pony suit and telling you "I don't think like you humans", especially not if she's allowed to lie to you (oh wait, she mostly only did that to the people she was compelled to tell the truth to). She's going to act like a person, to make sure that she maximizes her influence on you and minimizes your suspicion of her. She's going to make sure you trust her and always feel comfortable letting her know about anything in your life.
And then the "coincidences" start, don't they?
But that scene with the Pinkie-Bot was just hammering it all home way too hard. Had she really calculated that letting the guy die of bronchitis (or whatever it was) maximized the chance he would upload, whereas giving him medicine and extending his life would actively reduce the chances of his uploading? That seems unlikely.
Let's ignore the fact that CelestAi is a genocidal monster comparable to Satan himself and just fap because why not?