Technology has come to Ponyville, and with it all kinds of complications. The School of Friendship in particular has too many students using AI to cheat on their homework. Not to worry, though. A simple, no-exemptions ban on electronics will solve the problem for everyone.
Everyone except the robot employed in the tutoring lounge.
This is an entry in the Snippet Series, an anthology of old oneshots that I (and my good buddy Str8aura) wrote based around interesting pics I found. New ones will be posted every Thursday for the foreseeable future.
Chapters (1)
Sweetie Belle AND Sweetie Bot ?
You made a believable and functional dynamic here.
It worked.
This is interesting. I reckon I'll have to keep an eye out for your future stories.
Jamtech is so much fun, until your ballpoint pen stops inking, the graphite flakes in the pencil refuses to write due to graphene production, and the book refuses to open due to lever action.
I wonder between Sweetiebot and FlimFlam Products, given Apples Applecore should be the biggest company due to all the members of the Family purchasing the products, that Acorn Research Machines ever got anywhere, or people ignored them cos they thought the idea was nuts?
Or the classics?
Luna backs Big Blue.
Fluttershy bought shares in Anthill Inside.
Twilight purchesed a HEX?
Dash got Alienware.
Rarity restyled her applecore.
And as for Pinkie?
Why would she use anything sensible. she wants something Fun to play with. So how about a Pimiga.
Aw, this was cute! Also glad that Sweetie Bot got to go back to her job.
This was really sweet and well done. I really appreciate the fact they' drift in and out from being perfectly in sync with each other, it really helps sell Sweetie-bot as a unique character and voice, but also eerily similar to Sweetie Belle.
You really captured the voices of the characters excellently, bravo. n_n
(I clearly need to read or reread the sorta-prequel then too)
Also also, no need to apologize! Real life takes priority, even if it's often less fun. n_n
I’d love more chapters to this world you’ve created.
Any others out there agree ?
Something about Sweetie Belle and her imprinted bot friend says story potential...
After all, "anti-tech" is such a vague concept. Does it stop steam engines? Clockwork? A twig with the leaves stripped off? Abstract thought? Okay, probably not that last one. But really, it seems like a cellular jamming device was the better solution here rather than casting so broad a net.
... Yeah, there was definitely a better solution.
In any case, delightful tale of knock-on effects and questioning the degree to which a copy can diverge from the template. Surprisingly deep at times, though I can hardly blame Sweetie Bot for not wanting to linger there for too long. Thank you for it.
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im pretty sure a better way to look at it would be something similar to a magical EMP
I mean...she might have a point about that.
Actually, that does seem like it'd be more important--I can just imagine how terrible to work with Scootaloo must be without her morning coffee.
Uh...might want to start with the smoke detectors first, Sunburst. I should think for obvious reasons (not least of which being avoiding trouble with health and safety should they ever find out you're operating a school without working smoke detectors).
Oh yes, that fic! I'd faved that fic with the explicit expectation that there would be more forthcoming! Even though it obviously isn't in the way originally planned, nice to see my patience paid off.
I guess Ponyville will need a Windows update...
Intresting
Oh sweetiebot
Btw pretty sure Ida would be upset at people hating ai
Jesus christ. Don't scare me like that; looking in my feed and seeing 'Sweetie Bot' next to 'Casketbase' made my heart leap a foot.
An underrated aspect of robots is their schewed viewpoint on time and life. Just like Marvin having no problem waiting billions of years to catch up with his friends on the timeline, I like the idea of Sweetie having no problem spending 3/4ths of the year completely conked out and (spiritually) not existing.
If she can run internet, presumably she can collect money and make a payment all in her own head. Smart.
babz rulz ok
I'm glad we're staying consistent with Sweetie and Metal Sweetie existing concurrently. Having multiple facets of one character, El Goonish Shive style, is always a great way to bounce a single set of traits off itself.
I'll admit, the ending is kind of a stop. Granted, it leaves open the possibility for future entries, but since this story has the little green 'complete' flag attached to it, i would hope an individual entry in a verse to have its own satisfying arc. Since the conflict established is Bot feeling a bit too much like Belle, pulling an Infinity Train in some way and giving her something to make her own identity could have been fun- a new name, a new (magnetic?) hairstyle, some way of individualizing her beyond literally being a derivative in nature.
But aside from that, and the little nagging annoyance of hearing about chatgpt again, its always a treat to see you write robots.
Maybe that's just my embarrassment at the last time I interacted with bots, and practically came crying to you afterwards. Not fun memories.
This is why we never must take ChatGPT for granted.
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And discord uses an etch-a-sketch and a string phone plugged into the faucet. Still has the fastest connection speed in the city.
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Ah, sorry for the false fanfare. Be assured that whenever that particular project is ready, I'll have plenty of blog posts hyping it up beforehoof. In the meantime, I'm practicing with robot stories that lean more into le funi.
You aren't the first to flick my nose about the way Snippets stop rather than end. In this case, I think I was going for too subtle of a nod that Bot's fumbling for automony was yeilding success: Her template is content to trot off in the opposite direction. But hey, if it doesn't work then I know I need to stop typing stories at 1:00 AM when every one of my ideas sounds good to me. Bouncing a single set of traits off itself indeed.
You flinch at chatGPT, I do the same at black hoodies. I'm a tad nervous about my upcoming multi-chapter project now, but hopefully it'll be softballed by RoboTrix outsmarting the pegasus princess whose phone she's confined to. If not, you have my permission to upload a story about Lyra pulling invisible pranks and I'll be sure to squirm through it.
In conclusion: Robot ponies are fun. They're somehow even more innocent than their fuzzy peers. A recent reader made me aware that half my cover pics are 'upset pony looking down,' so I made sure to give Sweetie Bot the same treatment I do all my protagonists. She'd be mighty pleased to know I did.
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Well, I want to stress that ChatGPT is still no where NEAR advanced enough for self-awareness, so much so it will probably never develop it on its own. It might seem like it is at times, but knowing the basics of how it works, I can assure it's an illusion. Next to a truly self-aware AI like Sweetie-Bot here, in fact, ChatGPT is startlingly primitive by comparison.
But despite all that...I agree, we should treat AIs like ChatGPT with respect, not so much because it's advanced enough to require it, but because we might as well start getting into the practice of it now for when the real self-aware AIs actually do arrive in real-life.
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Oh no, I agree that ChatGTP is not and (probably) never will be self-aware, since it's really little more than a more robust search-engine. The whole debate over whether or not ChatGTP is self aware or not makes me think of this quote by Yuval Noah Harari:
"This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realize that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.”
nice little story, its funny that nobody can see as a robot she just wants to sip power and interact with students, she doesn't really have the needs or desire to be like her originator who is off doing bigger things
also loved the interactions between sweetie bot and her originator who sees her like a twin sister
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Self-awareness, in the technical sense, is not a question of advancement. All the term means is that an entity is aware of its own existence as distinct from everything that isn't itself. This is an exceptionally trivial thing to program into an AI — the Sims possess it. It is true, however, that ChatGPT does not possess such, and no similar language model ever will — simply because being aware of oneself is neither designed for nor necessary for anything that kind of architecture is trained to do.
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ChatGPT (and similar Large Language Models) are 100% not similar to search engines. They specifically lack such capabilities, and that's the source of a lot of their weaknesses. They're more like a basic version of the language center of a brain integrated with a kind of subconscious memory — like the stuff you can vaguely remember, but you can't quite remember where you found it or even if you didn't make it up.
I never really bought into the Sweetie Bot stories but I liked this one. Good Job!
Sweetie Bot only need to go to Princess Twilight or Chancellor Neighsay and complain about specism, she has a contract as a teacher and does her job, but they want to fire and don't want her to do her job, that is anti-friendship. They want to exclude her because she is a machine just because they are too lazy to check the work of the students, if they use a AI to copy then just give them a F
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That description is exactly why I love to call myself a human GPT.
Meh, sounds like my job at LG.
Someone higher up the ladder who has been stonewalling a request to update a system for months suddenly gets a wild hair in their butt and now instead of a minor update to deal with the new issue the current system is thrown out to make room for the "latest and greatest and quickest fix ever". Only to find that said new system just plain doesn't work half the time (at best), has already cost half a million dollars to instal along with weeks of downtime and will need that much again to get the "latest and greatest" to the point where its ALMOST as good as the old system, and it still doesn't fix the new threat. All because someone wanted another bullet point under the "things I achieved" category on their resume.
Lessons here folks. Just because you can solve a problem with fancy tech/ magic/ whatever doesn't mean you should. And not every problem is a crisis that needs to be fixed yesterday no matter what the over-promoted bootlicker says. Sometimes something as simple as banning phones and requiring the kids to leave book bags etc by the door combined with a "first one to break said rule and the students around them gets made into an example" will solve the problem just fine.
Nice!
A sweet and funny little snippet.
I was very surprised when I realised that both Sweetie Bot and Sweetie Belle exist in this timeline, their relationship was interesting.
Btw, loved portrayal of Sunburst in this one!
Expected a crackfic shitpost, got something actually emotional. Good job.
It's fics like this that make me adore fiction. Was expecting a joke plot at best, and it got genuinely emotional at the end. What a lovely work.
external-preview.redd.it/dYauOYm_5xIOee8bCHqIxw2L3QYCe-SJyC1QOMtTNko.jpg?auto=webp&s=fbc0d021fa7cc3dbe5cccba344244d21891a5cbc
Hello! I reviewed this a little while ago, and this courtesy note is delayed partly due to Covid and partly due to my lack of organisation. As a few others have already said, it's nice that you don't take the easy, cracky way out with this subject. Other than a rather abrupt ending, this is really rather sweet. Upvoted!