The AI Fiction Paradox

AI development has a fiction dependency problem: models are built on massive corpora of modern fiction and desperately need more of it, yet they struggle to generate it. I term this the AI-Fiction Paradox and it is particularly startling because in machine learning, training data typically determines output quality. This paper offers a theoretically precise account of why fiction resists AI generation by identifying three distinct challenges for current architectures. First, fiction depends on what I call narrative causation, a form of plot logic where events must feel both surprising in the moment and retrospectively inevitable. This temporal paradox fundamentally conflicts with the forward-generation logic of transformer architectures. Second, I identify an informational revaluation challenge: fiction systematically violates the computational assumption that informational importance aligns with statistical salience, requiring readers and models alike to retrospectively reweight the significance of narrative details in ways that current attention mechanisms cannot perform. Third, drawing on over seven years of collaborative research on sentiment arcs, I argue that compelling fiction requires multi-scale emotional architecture, the orchestration of sentiment at word, sentence, scene, and arc levels simultaneously. Together, these three challenges explain both why AI companies have risked billion-dollar lawsuits for access to modern fiction and why that fiction remains so difficult to replicate. The analysis also raises urgent questions about what happens when these challenges are overcome. Fiction concentrates uniquely powerful cognitive and emotional patterns for modeling human behavior, and mastery of these patterns by AI systems would represent not just a creative achievement but a potent vehicle for human manipulation at scale.

When Prohibitions Become Permissions: Auditing Negation Sensitivity in Language Models

When a user tells an AI system that someone "should not" take an action, the system ought to treat this as a prohibition. Yet many large language models do the opposite: they interpret negated instructions as affirmations. We audited 16 models across 14 ethical scenarios and found that open-source models endorse prohibited actions 77% of the time under simple negation and 100% under compound negation -- a 317% increase over affirmative framing. Commercial models fare better but still show swings of 19-128%. Agreement between models drops from 74% on affirmative prompts to 62% on negated ones, and financial scenarios prove twice as fragile as medical ones. These patterns hold under deterministic decoding, ruling out sampling noise. We present case studies showing how these failures play out in practice, propose the Negation Sensitivity Index (NSI) as a governance metric, and outline a tiered certification framework with domain-specific thresholds. The findings point to a gap between what current alignment techniques achieve and what safe deployment requires: models that cannot reliably distinguish "do X" from "do not X" should not be making autonomous decisions in high-stakes contexts.

The Paradox of Robustness: Decoupling Rule-Based Logic from Affective Noise in High-Stakes Decision-Making

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely documented to be sensitive to minor prompt perturbations and prone to sycophantic alignment with user biases, their robustness in consequential, rule-bound decision-making remains under-explored. In this work, we uncover a striking "Paradox of Robustness": despite their known lexical brittleness, instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit a behavioral and near-total invariance to emotional framing effects. Using a novel controlled perturbation framework across three high-stakes domains (healthcare, law, and finance), we quantify a robustness gap where LLMs demonstrate 110-300 times greater resistance to narrative manipulation than human subjects. Specifically, we find a near-zero effect size for models (Cohen's h = 0.003) compared to the substantial biases observed in humans (Cohen's h in [0.3, 0.8]). This result is highly counterintuitive and suggests the mechanisms driving sycophancy and prompt sensitivity do not necessarily translate to a failure in logical constraint satisfaction. We show that this invariance persists across models with diverse training paradigms. Our findings show that while LLMs may be "brittle" to how a query is formatted, they are remarkably "stable" against why a decision should be biased. Our findings establish that instruction-tuned models can decouple logical rule-adherence from persuasive narratives, offering a source of decision stability that complements, and even potentially de-biases, human judgment in institutional contexts. We release the 162-scenario benchmark, code, and data to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of narrative-induced bias and robustness on GitHub.com.

Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI

Applications of Generative AI (Gen AI) are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about the potential risks of the technology, and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in particular from some of the major tech companies who are leading in AI development. This regulation is likely to put at risk the budding field of open-source generative AI. Using a three-stage framework for Gen AI development (near, mid and long-term), we analyze the risks and opportunities of open-source generative AI models with similar capabilities to the ones currently available (near to mid-term) and with greater capabilities (long-term). We argue that, overall, the benefits of open-source Gen AI outweigh its risks. As such, we encourage the open sourcing of models, training and evaluation data, and provide a set of recommendations and best practices for managing risks associated with open-source generative AI.

Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open Source Generative AI

In the next few years, applications of Generative AI are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about potential risks and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in particular from some of the major tech companies who are leading in AI development. This regulation is likely to put at risk the budding field of open source Generative AI. We argue for the responsible open sourcing of generative AI models in the near and medium term. To set the stage, we first introduce an AI openness taxonomy system and apply it to 40 current large language models. We then outline differential benefits and risks of open versus closed source AI and present potential risk mitigation, ranging from best practices to calls for technical and scientific contributions. We hope that this report will add a much needed missing voice to the current public discourse on near to mid-term AI safety and other societal impact.