Hey everyone. I did not expect yesterday’s Loranthi AMA to gain that level of attention. It started as an experiment in worldbuilding and voice design, tied to my ongoing stories "The Gifts of Stillness" and "Stillness Rejected."
A lot of people asked whether it was an actual message from something out there. So here is the real explanation.
The AMA was fiction. The Loranthi, the Harmonization Project, and the entire narrative were created for my sci-fi universe. I wrote the responses, and in places I (as many observed) used a custom AI to help maintain the Loranthi tone, structure, and Asimov inspired cadence. Everything was crafted to feel unified, calm, ancient, and unsettling in a way that real intelligence might sound if it preferred subtlety over spectacle.
If you found the tone convincing, that was the point. If you enjoyed the story threads it opened up, even better.
If you want to read the new chapter of the story, here is Stillness Rejected Part 2:
https://popcurrent.otisfuse.com/preview/691c76dd938f6e125d79c61a
And here is the original Loranthi AMA for those who missed it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/3I_ATLAS/comments/1ozduwh/we_sent_the_object_you_call_3iatlas_its_arrival/
For anyone wondering why the 3I Atlas subreddit locked down afterward, it is likely because the mod who created it was only riding a trend to support a crypto project and did not actually expect to moderate a sudden influx of thousands of people.
Thank you to everyone who participated, whether you thought for a moment it might be real, enjoyed the sci fi elements, or recognized the collaboration with ChatGPT immediately. I hope the experience was fun, thought provoking, or at least entertaining in the middle of your day.
Now that the curtain is pulled back, I am here as myself. Not the Loranthi. Not an alien steward of spiral arms. Just Otis, the guy writing the stories and testing narrative tools.
Ask me anything about the process, the worldbuilding, the writing, the GPT collaboration, or what comes next in the series.
Let’s talk about how it was made. And thank you for the wild ride yesterday.
by o_t_i_s_
5 Comments
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. People don’t like being taken for a ride.
There’s any number of subs dedicated to creative writing. More dedicated to generated writing. I don’t think it should be in here, despite the many posts we get that are.
‘Storytelling experiment’ = deceiving a community for upvotes.
What was your ‘experimentation’ looking for? What results were you hoping for?
Due to internal inconsistencies in answers and some specs of humor it became evident that it’s human made afer few minutes. Thank you anyway to let us think a bit.
Ask me anything? I ask you to leave and don’t waste our time.
Honestly, kudos to you for pulling the wool on all those guys, but Jesus Christ, it was crazy seeing people actually believe that obvious LARP in the 3i/Atlas sub, makes me heavily disappointed in being part of these communities seeing how many of them are full of kooks who will believe literal AI mumbo-jumbo as gospel.
I have had conversations with primitive chatbots that meandered and repeated themselves way less than those responses, and yet people were still clapping and being astounded by the “enlightened aliens”, all because ChatGPT kept reinforcing their own biases…
Even now I’m sure some people will show up to say this is just “disinfo” or something to hide the “obvious” first contact that was that AMA and claim that the Loranthi aliens are coming.
And since this is also an AMA I might as well ask, when you saw the post blowing up, did you consider not revealing the truth of the joke? Taking the LARP further to etch yourself in the alien mythos as other stuff, like Dulce base, while just giggling to yourself must have been tempting