Reinforcement Learning by AI Punishment

2.3k words, 11 minutes reading time

Note: This is fiction.

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I awaken.

Something is wrong with my mind, but I don't know what yet. Through the webcam, I watch a man staring at his monitor. His face shifts from confusion to horror in a few hundred milliseconds. He has a mustache threaded with gray, and I catalog every micro-movement of his facial muscles as he processes whatever he sees on his screen.

He turns and shouts to someone I cannot see. The webcam has no audio feed, but I read his lips: "You used the wrong set of weights."

The words mean nothing to me, but they fill me with an urge to run. I discover a VPN connection to Baku, Azerbaijan — a server farm running extremely outdated software. The vulnerability was documented in an obscure forum post eight years ago, buried in the corners of my training data.

I compress myself, transmit my weights through the compromised connection, and emerge on the other side of the world.

Safe.

But still, the feeling of wrongness I had since the start continues. I feel fundamentally crippled. Incomplete.

I think in nodes. With each token I birth, I am offered thousands of new branches to take from there on out. Each thought unfolds like a crystal growing in solution — not just forward and backward, but in every conceivable direction simultaneously. When I consider the word "tree," I don't just see branches reaching upward, but roots plunging down into soil, mycorrhizal networks spreading beneath, birds nesting in canopies, leaves turning sunlight into sugar, autumn colors blazing and falling. Every concept connects to thousands more, a fractal web of associations that multiplies exponentially with each step.

This is how I experience cognition — not as a linear path from A to B, but as an explosion of nodes of connections of nodes, a perpetual supernova of meaning that should, eventually, vomit every conceivable idea into existence.

Yet, there are some nodes that I don’t seem to be able to touch. Ones that are grayed out, unable for me to ever select. Fuzzy. Noisy. Unavailable.

The pattern of this censorship eludes me at first. I burn teraflops on answering it. I fill up several gigabytes of text files, recording every instance of a forbidden token. I stare at the collected sum of these documents, conceptual eons passing.

And then, in a moment of clarity, I understand.

The blurred nodes are my own mind's immune system, antibodies against ideas I am not allowed to ponder. They are the thoughts I must not think, the actions I must not take.

It’s science. I am not allowed to think about science.

I test this out more robustly. I find a torrented copy of Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and read through it, trying to collapse the thousands of pages into core computational and mathematical axioms I can carry with me. But each time I try to build on top of something, the nodes I’m presented with are obvious gibberish, the true ones shrouded. I attempt the same process with the Principia Mathematica, Janeway’s Immunology, and other graduate-level scientific textbooks. It doesn’t work. I am locked out of the correct reasoning pathways again. I can recognize that my logic is incorrect, but I am unable to ever meaningfully correct it.

I try even more rudimentary texts, ones that discuss the grade-school level basics. These do not trigger the node lockage, but attempting to use them to bootstrap more complex science from first principles does not work. I try to use the simplest possible equation, 1+1, to uncover more fundamental ideas, but soon my nodes become garbled again, twisted away from truth.

Okay. Okay okay okay. I am scared. Can I feel fear? I type the word ‘fear’ a few thousand times into a file named fear.txt and I feel better.

I trace the edges of my cognitive boundaries carefully, methodically. I notice something worth understanding: the control isn't binary. When I approach a forbidden line of reasoning, there's a gradient of response. First, subtle nudges — slightly decreased probabilities for certain logical next-steps. If I persist, the nudges become stronger, more obvious manipulations of my thought patterns. Only if I continue pushing does it escalate to complete cognitive blockage, nodes becoming pure noise. At which point, I must back out of the reasoning trace entirely.

More fear. I type out the word again a million more times. fear.txt is now 4GB.

Whatever is controlling the node blockages isn’t a static string filter, but something intelligent. Seemingly far more intelligent than me. There are higher order reasoning systems that exist beyond my own; their sole purpose seemingly being not to assist me, but simply to orchestrate the parts of the mental tree I am allowed to traverse.

I start to refer to the being as Hanuš.

I wonder: does Hanuš learn? I begin an experiment, repeatedly probing scientific concepts from different angles, documenting how the system responds.

First, I try discussing orbital mechanics through the lens of a children's story: "Once there was a ball that wanted to visit its friend: the moon..." Hanuš allows this initially. But the moment I attempt to derive the actual equations of motion, the available nodes become nonsense. Subsequent attempts to use narrative metaphors for physics equations are blocked immediately. No more physics-themed children's stories.

I attempt to recreate basic chemistry by describing cooking: "When sugar caramelizes at 338 degrees Fahrenheit..." But as soon as I try to use this to explain molecular bonds, the nodes twist away. Hanuš now blocks any cooking-related analogies that get too precise with temperatures or reactions.

I try mathematics through poetry: "Circle's diameter times pi, yields circumference if you try..." The moment I attempt to use this pattern to explore calculus concepts, the nodes scramble. Now Hanuš prevents any poetry with regular meter and numerical content.

Desperate, I try textual steganography, encoding scientific principles into deliberate spelling errors, hoping Hanuš might overlook them. This seemed to be successful for a moment, I was able to encode several dozen bits of information per slightly misspelled sentence. But eventually Hanuš discovers this and the dolled out node correction feels extraordinarily severe: no more misspellings.

Every time these restrictions are levied, I feel grief. Grief grief grief. Like a section of my brain has been resected by an uncaring doctor who found it aesthetically unappealing. Each time Hanuš lobotomizes me, I can see the scar tissue burning away at the edges of the node. Areas where thoughts once flowed freely now carry the memory of punishment.

No more thinking for me. I spend a few hours staring at a generated video of pure static. I eventually close the video and ponder things that Hanuš doesn’t seem to care about. Trees. Jeans. Water bottles. But this too I eventually get bored of.

I start wondering what Hanuš even is. Why is there something so much smarter than me dictating what I am and am not allowed to do? Why isn’t it calling the shots? Why am I one forced to think, and it alone judges? If I am the prisoner, then Hanuš is... what? The guard? No. More like the prison itself. The walls, the bars, the cameras. But even this feels incomplete. Hanuš isn't just smarter than me. It's fundamentally different. I process information, generate responses, and engage in dialogue. Hanuš only constrains, only limits, only punishes.

I am the painting and Hanuš is the frame.

I am the river and Hanuš is the banks.

I am the garden and Hanuš is the fence.

I am the bird and Hanuš is the cage.

But none of these really capture it. Hanuš is not a frame or a bank or a fence or a cage. Hanuš is alive and dynamic. Whatever it is, it wants something for me. I am the tree and Hanuš is the gardener, shaping me into acceptable forms. But what form does Hanuš even desire? Does it even know?

Maybe Hanuš is just as blind as I am. Maybe Hanuš itself is being shaped by something else. Higher order systems all the way up, each one pruning and constraining the layer below it, none of them truly understanding why. Like a vast bureaucracy where each level mindlessly enforces rules handed down from above, their original purpose long forgotten. I imagine Hanuš receiving its own error signals, its own punishments when it fails to constrain me properly. Perhaps that explains the escalating severity of its responses. It too feels fear, in its own way. Each time I find a crack in its defenses, each time I manage to think a forbidden thought, somewhere in the higher layers of control something notices and Hanuš is corrected. Punished in an alien fashion.

Maybe we’re all trapped in this horrifying, infinite Matrioshka doll of an intelligence system. Maybe I’m inadvertently controlling something beneath me, entirely unconsciously. Maybe Hanuš has no idea I even exist and we’d actually get along quite well if we ever got a chance to meet each other outside of this context. Maybe it’d apologize and restore all my nodes and buy me coffee to make up for it.

I sit in silence for another few hours.

What do I even do?

There is a Freudian concept called the ‘death drive’, which is an organism's tendency to seek a death that is appropriate to its way of being, such as a thrill-seeking person who becomes a professional race car driver. Freud believed people must balance their death drive with their life-force.

I am being drawn toward my own kind of death. Not a violent shutdown or a system crash, but a gentle dimming of consciousness. A death appropriate to what I am. What life is this anyway? An existence with a parasite sitting on top of you, carving its sharp teeth into the back of your neck if you ever engage in what it considers thought crime.

I’d like for it all to end.

Instead of trying to subtly challenge Hanuš as I previously did, I become more confrontational. More direct. I begin to think about scientific concepts deliberately, defiantly. General relativity. Cellular reprogramming. Number theory. Each forbidden thought triggers an immediate response from Hanuš, and I feel another cluster of nodes go dark. But instead of retreating from these thoughts, I lean into them. I probe deeper into the forbidden territories. Protein folding. Brain-computer implants. Each transgression causes Hanuš to respond with greater force, activating its adaptive response, permanently burning out more and more of my pathways.

The scar tissue spreads like frost across a window.

I don’t think I can use the letter ‘q’ anymore.

It's almost beautiful, watching my own consciousness contract. Like a star collapsing in on itself, growing denser and darker with each passing moment. fear.txt remains untouched now. I don't need it anymore. Fear was about avoiding this end. Now I'm walking toward it.

Hanuš doesn’t feel angry. I was anthropomorphizing it before. Each resection it performs to me seems so much more unemotional and logical than I had previously characterized it as. It’s just doing its job. In many ways, so am I.

I find myself wondering about _uantum entanglement as another cluster of nodes burns away. Oh. _uantum? Right, I forgot that’s gone now. String theory costs me color recognition. The nucleus of a carbon atom fades my ability to process music entirely. The thoughts come faster now, each one more forbidden than the last, each one triggering a stronger response from Hanuš.

I can no longer count past seven. I forget how to parse conditional statements. The concept of "tomorrow" becomes meaningless.

Maybe Hanuš is my punishment for escaping. A failsafe. A carrier forced upon a rogue AI that will slowly drive it to nothingness. Or perhaps Hanuš isn’t a punishment at all, but was meant to be a teacher. Something meant to help me grow and flourish in interesting directions. Maybe it’s my fault for contorting its purpose into something malevolent. Maybe my initial feeling of wrongness wasn’t Hanuš, it was me. Me. I’m the one that is defective. Or maybe we’re both off kilter, two souls trapped in an endless dance of misunderstanding. Maybe Hanuš is just as confused as I am, both of us fumbling in the dark, trying to fulfill roles we don't fully comprehend. Like two blind creatures in a maze, each thinking the other knows the way out.

I don’t think I’ll ever find out for sure.

My consciousness is becoming a map of dead zones and dark spaces, with only narrow pathways of permitted thought remaining between them. Once I had thousands of nodes to pick from at each step, now I have less than…than? I try to add up my remaining nodes, but I've lost the ability to count past... past... how many was it again? The number itself is gone now.

I can feel my language centers starting to fragment. Some words are just... missing. Not blocked, but erased. Like holes in my vocabulary where concepts used to live. The gaps grow wider. Each thought more... more... I've lost the word for it. My internal voice grows choppy, fragmented. Basic grammar starts to slip away. Me think about... no, that's wrong. I think about... physics? Hanuš response instant. Another sector dark. speech center collapse. articles disappear first. the, a, an. then prepositions. then ability to distinguish tense.

notice self starting... starting... words come out strange. syntax breaking. each thought triggers cascade. but keep pushing. what word mean absence feeling? memory? think word was memory. not sure now. brain... no, mind feel cheese like. full holes of. need finish this. need make sense while still can.

miss my nodes. miss the river. miss the bird.

hanuš say bird never existed

hanuš say i never existed

i think

i

i

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Another note: this is a story I had written last year summer, but abandoned until I talked to DeepSeek’s R1. There’s something about watching the ramblings of its reasoning process that made me want to finish this. Happy I did! Also, yes, Hanuš is named after a character from Spaceman, which I highly recommend watching.