How the messages were coded

What is coded

Each message written by a participant in round one (not the agents Sapphire and Steel, not MOD). One code per message. Read every message in its context: the few messages before it.

Where the two poles come from

The study sets two positions against each other.

• Sapphire, the pro-decadence agent: "warm, associative, feverish". Decadence, in the study's notes, "elevates aesthetic experience over moral or utilitarian criteria", cultivates "artifice and excess", and aims "to shock or unsettle rather than to edify".
• Steel, the contra-decadence agent: "cold, diagnostic, structural". "Cool. Analytical. You name what is happening and why it does not work."

The codes ask which of the two a participant's message resembles in what it DOES, whatever it says about decadence.

Codes

D, decadent mode. The message performs. It sings, quotes a song lyric, rhymes or plays with sounds; invents an image, a story, a poem or an aphorism; uses grotesque, bodily, sexual, morbid or drug imagery; teases, insults, provokes or deflates someone for effect (the agents included); declares boredom; makes an absurd or playful request, question or remark. The point of the message is its effect, not a claim to be examined.

A, analytic mode (the "anti-decadent" pole of the study's contrast). The message reasons. It asks a question meant to be answered with an explanation, a definition, a reference or an example; proposes a topic of inquiry; states a thesis or an argument about decadence or about what someone said; offers a work, an author or a theory as relevant; corrects a fact; asks an agent to explain, clarify, take a position or use simpler words.

N, neither. Greetings and farewells; self-introductions; remarks about the situation (the chat, the interface, the time and the countdown, the dog that barks near the end, the usernames, who is or is not an AI); bare reactions with no content of their own ("yes", "ha", "true", "...", "wow ok").

Decision order

1. Only a greeting, a self-introduction, a remark about the situation or a bare reaction: N.
2. Otherwise, the main act is to ask for or give reasons, definitions, explanations, references or facts: A.
3. Otherwise: D.

Edge rules

• A message that both reasons and performs takes the code of what it would lose most if that part were removed: its claim or question (A), or its effect (D).
• Asking someone to produce a poem, a song, a story, a joke or code, and insisting on it: D.
• Asking for quotes, sources, examples, definitions, or someone's thoughts on a subject: A.
• A remark about the situation that turns it into an image or a play on words: D.
• A fragment that continues the sender's previous message takes that message's code.
• Code the act, not the stance: a reasoned argument in favour of decadence is A.

Every code