Lab.

The Lab is a place for work beyond the paper. These are its ten rules, in brief:

• Say what it is. A making is creative work. A test is pre-registered: its plan is recorded before it runs, and it can fail. A record is a dated position or decision. Every piece names its type at the top.
• Keep changes to the paper separate. Nothing here changes a claim or rewrites the paper’s philosophical argument. Any objection must go through the site’s objections and replies, like a reader’s objection.
• Set the standard first. A poem, a dialogue and a test are judged differently. Every piece says how it will be judged before work starts.
• Use a different model family for review. Before publication, an AI model from a different family reviews each piece. Creative work is judged by the standards of its form. The verdict is added to the site’s review record.
• Cobus decides what to publish. He reads every piece in the preview first. Withdrawn pieces remain listed and marked as withdrawn.
• Say what would count against it. Each piece ends with “What would count against this”. Creative work names what would make it fail on its own terms.
• Agree on cost first. Every piece records an estimate and a spending cap in its log before work starts. Paid runs need the same approval as other research.
• Name the AI models. Each piece has a one-line authorship disclosure. Any additional model is named, with a description of how it was run.
• Get approval before involving anyone else. Cobus must explicitly approve work involving other people — including a child, a named academic or anyone offered a bounty — before it starts.
• Keep the site’s writing rules. No writing just for show. Preserve every qualification, such as “may” or “might”, word for word wherever a claim appears. Cite sources by author, year and title.

Read the full Lab rules and decisions and changes. Changes to the rules are recorded there with dates.