Intellectual Property

LessWrong published a short work of fiction about a detective hired to investigate corporate espionage at a tech startup. But when the detective visits the competitor, the twist emerges: the entire investigation—including the real detective—has been designed as a training scenario that the company sells to AI developers. The detective collects payment from both sides with no real answers. The story darkly plays with a provocative idea: when you're building increasingly realistic training environments for artificial intelligence, where exactly does the line between reality and performance fall? The detective investigates a crime that was never a crime, making the act of investigation itself the product being sold.

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