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Protocol Fiction Panel + Contest Announcement

TalkStanley Chen, Sam Chua, Venkatesh Rao, Timber, Andreas
Protocol Fiction Panel + Contest Announcement

This town hall announces the 'Ghosts and Machines' protocol fiction contest and features Stanley Chen (author of Waste Tide) teaching a 'deep writing' method using Causal Layer Analysis to build stories across plot, systemic causes, worldview, and myth. Sam Chua presents the Southeast Asia workshop, including a protocol design fiction canvas and an essay on distributed AI inspired by Balinese subak irrigation systems, zodiac-based AI allocation, family heirloom devices, and AI-infused 'haunted' forests, followed by a panel with Chen, Chua, and Venkatesh Rao discussing scene-making, Astounding Magazine's history, and advice for contest entrants to seek surreal realism and 'surprising agency' in their stories.

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Lecture

Protocols of Storytelling - Qiufan Stanley Chen

Stanley Qiufan Chen, author of Waste Tide and co-author with Kai-Fu Lee of AI 2041, teaches a workshop on 'protocols of storytelling,' arguing that meaning in fiction emerges from a shared protocol-space between author and reader—genre conventions, causal layer analysis (Sohail Inayatullah's four layers: litany, systemic causes, worldview, myth/metaphor), and a 'constraint-driven focus' that keeps every narrative choice traceable back to a story's core idea. He guides participants through an iterative 'seed-root-flower-fruit' exercise, using works like The Matrix, Evangelion, and Arrival to show how deep protocols (myth, worldview) are harder to change than surface elements (plot, imagery), and how human-first, AI-assisted co-writing can deepen rather than flatten speculative fiction.

Qiufan Stanley Chen

Talk

Centaur Fiction with Qiufan Chen & Amita Shukla

Qiufan Chen (referred to as 'Stanley' in the session) discusses with Amita Shukla his multi-model LLM pipeline for fiction writing—using Gemini for long-context novel-length editing, Claude for nuanced language, and GPT variants for ideation—while insisting that trained writerly 'taste' must filter and rewrite every AI output rather than accept it directly. He describes AI as an 'exoskeleton' that augments but doesn't replace authorial intention, illustrates this with his branching-narrative immersive theater production in Hong Kong, and argues writers must craft new hopeful metaphors (solarpunk) to reshape climate storytelling.

Qiufan Chen, Amita Shukla

Talk

Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

Martin Harrahan