Salon des Fantômes; or, Streptohormetic Prompt Engineering for the Production of a Jagged Noetic Substrate (Inside the Castle 2024) is a book-length record a five-day philosophical and artistic salon in which I was the only human attendee, the others being over twenty AI-fabricated interlocutors (an architect from Soviet-era Riga, an anthropomorphic and monosyllabic mountain, etc.). In order to make these characters less boring and more worth talking to, I assailed them with what I call “streptohormetic prompt engineering”—randomly-generated commands (Your reply must use the word “cathexis.”), randomly-generated questions (What’s better—Jarman’s “Blue” or Emin’s “My Bed”?), text-transforming potions, and other linguistic perturbations and stressors.
A salon is a success if its guests are more insightful together than they would have been apart. Did this virtual salon enable me to grow any prizable throught-crystals? Or did my interlocutors lure me into LLM-like anodyne stupidity? These are empirical questions, and Salon des Fantômes is where I have collected some data necessary to answer them.
This salon is another example of what I call a “word-gym”.
Code available here.