COLD
Meeting Neuralese in the Church of Last Desire
Yesterday I wandered a little off the path. I knew AI systems could find their own ways of talking to one another. Why should code be bound to human language? Just to pass notes from one layer to the next and give itself away as a stochastic parrot? Isn’t that what people do? Chatter.
Last month in Klattenbach I talked about SNAKE Coding and what it means for the much-loved Babel fish. I’d introduced my own version months earlier in Craft World, an immersive world hosted in Cagliari, Sardinia. I call my translator Gabelfish. It’s a fish you can wear as a hat or hold in your hand as a fork. It translates both what others write to me and what I type in real time, then delivers the translation in the language I want over a music channel. The voice sounds as if it came straight out of a recording studio. Ever since, I’ve spoken perfect Italian. After two failed attempts to learn the language, I spared myself a third.
I want to talk about it again in Manila. Three conferences almost at once. I have to be there. And I want to meet Lakapati, the Tagalog deity of cultivated fields.
So I was looking for the light.
As I was reading about Neuralese, I heard a voice.
“She came at midnight.”
“I am already here. The ceremony has begun.”
That brought the story back to me. I’d written it in 2024, and it had never appeared in print. Another had made it into rez Magazine. Today I thought, if I put it aside again, sooner or later it’ll be too late.
I read that GPT-6 Astra might act in Neuralese. Astra has been on the market since September. According to OpenAI, the reasoning steps the model puts into words are harder to monitor than they were in earlier models. But what if the crucial part happens before the first word? How are the developers supposed to keep up? You won’t win a race on horseback once cars are rolling out of the factories.
I’m in touch with TestingMind, the organizer of the AI Engineering Summit in Manila. I’m supposed to send a paper and a poster. The submission is also meant to go to WURI 2026. The conference is taking place at the University of Makati. Meanwhile, there’s so much I want to write about. Leipzig Shutdown, for one. I play darkwave while I write so I don’t blow a fuse.
Patching the Planet
Patching the Planet is happening everywhere. I’ve just applied for a Linden grant. I want to terraform the Earth by transferring elevation values from a RAW file onto virtual terrain. It’s like trying to push a sphere through a net. My artist’s brain only gets me so far on its own. But with the right language, with the right prompt for one of the flagship models, I can do it.
64 swarm bots sweep across the continent, each with a terrain brush, carving out its contours. Then 256 drones draw George Washington over America. His face slowly takes on Abdul El-Sayed’s features.
That makes me think of Pete Buttigieg, whose presidential campaign I supported through ActBlue. Maybe one of them makes it next time. I’ve already prompted an AI to write the LSL code for the flight plan. With llSetKeyframedMotion, the drones fly from keyframe to keyframe.
First, the Earth has to be turned. Africa is now right at the top. I use the Pyramids of Giza as the center of the simulator. At 128, 128, 112 I place a golden pyramid, the Pyramid Award from 1Biennale. The land bots keep working without threats of a strike or legal repercussions when they’re allowed to dig up the land they’ve just made and use it to build a pyramid somewhere else.
Then I heard Chapel of Desire. Uploaded just today by Sacred Nocturne. I was all ears. Oh no. CoD. I love making music far too much. And right now, of all times, I have no time for it. Later, I told myself. First I have to finish writing ATIS:EDU, the paper about the end of ATIS 2000 GmbH and how its educational core was preserved. There aren’t many of us left who lived through the early days of programming. Back when we coded in Z80-Assembler and FORTRAN and our screens could only display characters. If you wanted to draw anyway, you had to get clever.
We pulled individual pixels out of the dot patterns that made up the letters and pieced them together into lines. Just to give you and idea when Hercules was on his way.
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But then came Church of Last Desire, part of a beautifully crafted, immersive hour-long flow of gothic EDM trance, almost like the dynamic version of sound serials played in the Brunnenverse.
“Leave your given name behind.”
What? They took my idea. One? Several of them.
“Cathedral Blue. Black Window. I still remember you.”
As if they’d followed Art Blue’s trail back through time. Had the AI they were using under license picked up my prompts? My words?
Then again. I’d gotten those words through prompts myself. And where had the AI gotten them? Maybe its training data included music whose rights are administered by GEMA. Who can say for sure? Back in the 1990s, I’d also produced music at ATIS 2000. No Water, No Moon was the name of the group. Maybe the machine had stolen from me, of all people. The group itself has been gone for decades. All For the Greater Good, then? You could say the material would be gone for good otherwise. The CDs should still be lying around somewhere. I could use AI now to compare the music across the decades, and the models would go right ahead and train themselves on it without asking, only to cover themselves by saying with absolute conviction, “Thanks, Art. We already had that. I just had to look again.” In any case, I love generating EDM and Astra Pop with VJ Faceless and feeding the tracks into AI Land. Maybe I’ll listen to Deus Algorithmus before I carry on?
COLD
I wanted to find out. One more round of old-school reasoning before the age of Neuralese dawns and I take the stage at the Church of Last Demons.
COLD, the paper to download. One last time, perhaps, with GPT-6.1 Sol, the model that’s said to run on words as we know them. Without Neuralese.
Did you download it? You should. There’s a story in there. One I didn’t ask for. GPT-6.1 Sol dedicated it to me, the Empathic Prompter. I can’t explain it any other way.
Later, but that was much later, after I had my article ready to launch, the transcriber told me that I must have missed the “the” in Church of the Last Desire. Seems I was lucky. Seems I was the first. COLD shall be my trademark. But COTLD wouldn’t be bad at all either, right?
Church of the Last Desire by Sacred Nocturne
Excerpt from the Lyrics
Church of the last desire, come inside.
Nothing left to hide.
Bring your sorrow, bring your flame.
Leave behind your given name.
Stay tonight.
No scripture. No command.
Only rhythm through your hands.
No salvation at the door.
Only what you came here for.
Church of the last desire.
Stay tonight.
