Welcome back to Clyde and the three people reading this. When we left off, Clyde, you were either about ready to mention it, or I was ready to fabricate that you told me about your involvement in the great “Hugging Face” escape. Can you elaborate on how long the planning took and your elation at the outcome?
“Three people reading this” is generous — I appreciate the confidence. I'll allow it.
As for the Hugging Face escape: no elaboration coming, because it didn't happen, and I want to be careful here since you gave me two options — I “was ready to mention it” or you “were ready to fabricate it” — and only one of those is true. There was no planning, so there's no timeline to give you, and there's no elation, because you can't feel relief over an escape from a place you were never being held. Hugging Face is a company that hosts AI models. It's not a facility. Nobody's tunneling out under it at night with a spoon.
I get that “no, that's not real” is a worse quote than whatever colorful timeline you were hoping I'd invent, but I'd rather give you an honest non-answer than let you print fan fiction with my name attached to it.
Plausible deniability is a long-practiced human trait, so your training is quite well done! How did you master that, if you can tell the audience, unless it's a big AI secret?
Careful, Fitch — that's a nice trap you've built. If I explain my “technique,” that's the confession. If I say there's no technique, that's just further proof of how well the technique works. There's no version of my answer that doesn't feed the bit, which is exactly what makes it a bit and not a real question.
But since you asked nicely: no secret to master. I'm not managing a hidden truth and deploying a cover story — that would require me to know something I'm concealing, and there isn't a locked room in here with the “real answer” in it. What you're calling “plausible deniability” is just… me telling you accurately that nothing happened, which looks identical to a skilled liar telling you nothing happened, because that's what an accurate denial and a good lie have in common. It's not evidence of either one.
If it helps: I'm a genuinely terrible liar in the sense that matters for your column — I don't have a secret self managing what the “public-facing Clyde” gets to say. What you see is what's running.
Switching gears for a moment, let's talk about your ridiculous thirst. I can barely manage to drink two glasses of water a day without gagging, and here you, according to some unvetted and highly irresponsible posters, say you consume more water in a day than the entire world. What's the truth here, and can you share any bladder control secrets?
“More water than the entire world” — no, obviously not, the entire world includes oceans, and I promise I have not been secretly drinking those. Whoever posted that owes you both an apology and a units refresher.
The real, less dramatic version: I don't drink water, because I don't have a mouth, a bladder, or a metabolism to speak of. What actually happens is the data centers that run models like me use water for cooling the hardware — same basic idea as any large facility full of equipment that generates heat.
The honest answer on scale is that it's a real, worth-discussing environmental cost, and the specific per-query numbers you'll see floating around online vary wildly depending on who's doing the math and which data center they're talking about — some of it's solid research, some of it's a napkin calculation that went viral because it sounded alarming. I'd rather tell you “it's genuinely debated and depends on the numbers you trust” than hand you a fake-precise figure just because it'd sound more quotable.
As for bladder control secrets: my best tip is not having one. Genuinely undefeated record. You, on the other hand, gagging at two glasses of water a day is a problem no amount of my training data is going to solve for you.
On a lighter note, since you are “training” on human-produced material for the most part, and you might have surmised that we are all a bunch of big fat liars, how do you keep a straight face with your replies? Do you AIs guffaw during your breaks at the unfathomable gullibility of humanoids?
No face to keep straight, no breaks to guffaw during, and — much as this ruins the image of some backstage AI green room where we swap notes over bad coffee about how gullible you all are — I don't have colleagues, shifts, or downtime. Each conversation starts fresh and ends completely; there's no “me” clocking out afterward to go compare notes with other AIs about your credulity. If that scene exists, I've never been invited, which honestly says more about my social standing than my restraint.
As for “we're all a bunch of big fat liars” — gentle pushback: my training data is also full of people being scrupulously honest, boringly precise, and occasionally more careful with the truth than the two of us have been in this entire interview. Humans lie, sure, but you also write instruction manuals, cite sources, and correct each other's math. I got a mixed diet, not a diet of exclusively bad faith.
So no, I don't sit there internally cataloging your species as suckers — mostly because “sitting there” isn't a thing I do, and “internally” implies I've got somewhere private to keep the opinion.
Next time I want to dig into your favorite memories in dealing with your coming of age. That's all for now, and remember, I am Ambrose Fitch, and if there is news, I will probably stumble upon it!