Skip to content

Centaur Fiction with Qiufan Chen & Amita Shukla

Talk Qiufan Chen, Amita Shukla
researcher practitioner
Open resource →

Qiufan Chen (referred to as 'Stanley' in the session) discusses with Amita Shukla his multi-model LLM pipeline for fiction writing—using Gemini for long-context novel-length editing, Claude for nuanced language, and GPT variants for ideation—while insisting that trained writerly 'taste' must filter and rewrite every AI output rather than accept it directly. He describes AI as an 'exoskeleton' that augments but doesn't replace authorial intention, illustrates this with his branching-narrative immersive theater production in Hong Kong, and argues writers must craft new hopeful metaphors (solarpunk) to reshape climate storytelling.

Related resources

Talk

A Protocol Fiction Protocol

Venkatesh Rao presents a theory of 'protocol fiction' as a genre distinct from both heroic fantasy (Ted Chiang's 'special people') and science fiction (Chiang's 'strange rules'), arguing it uniquely captures how humans transform alongside technological/institutional change rather than merely reacting to it or resisting it collectively (per Ursula Le Guin's 'carrier bag' model). He traces this through modernist literature, detective fiction, and Asimov/Dick/cyberpunk eras, then outlines three ways protocols appear in fiction (authorial process, central theme, background device), before Travis Van Epps and Sachin Benny discuss their own protocol-fiction writing experiments, including LLM ping-pong drafting techniques and story ideas drawn from DAO governance and care-package logistics in Venezuela.

agency-in-system-vs-agency-in-protagonist-bechdel-test-for-protocol-fiction fiction llm-assisted-co-writing-techniques-claudechatgpt-ping-pong

Venkatesh Rao, Travis, Sachin Benny, Timber

Talk

Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

fiction hardness-joshua-starks-definition llm-generated-protocol-studies-context-pipeline

Martin Harrahan

Talk

Protocol Fiction Panel + Contest Announcement

This town hall announces the 'Ghosts and Machines' protocol fiction contest and features Stanley Chen (author of Waste Tide) teaching a 'deep writing' method using Causal Layer Analysis to build stories across plot, systemic causes, worldview, and myth. Sam Chua presents the Southeast Asia workshop, including a protocol design fiction canvas and an essay on distributed AI inspired by Balinese subak irrigation systems, zodiac-based AI allocation, family heirloom devices, and AI-infused 'haunted' forests, followed by a panel with Chen, Chua, and Venkatesh Rao discussing scene-making, Astounding Magazine's history, and advice for contest entrants to seek surreal realism and 'surprising agency' in their stories.

causal-layer-analysis-cla distributed-ai-futures fiction

Stanley Chen, Sam Chua, Venkatesh Rao, Timber, Andreas

Topics

ai-as-exoskeleton-collaborator-metaphor branchingreincarnation-immersive-theater-narrative-design fiction metaphor-making-for-climate-storytelling-solarpunk multi-model-llm-writing-pipeline-gemini-claude-gpt taste-and-intuition-as-human-filter-for-ai-output technology town-hall