8 ms·

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a moder

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call it divination is that it's skinned in dark mode UX instead of stars and moons. Barthes reminds us that all meaning is in the eye of the reader; words have no essence, only interpretation. When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection. What we're seeing isn't new, just unfamiliar. We used to read bones and cards. Now we read tokens. They look like language, so we treat them like arguments. But they're just as oracular, complex, probabilistic signals we transmute into insight. We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture that doesn't know it's practicing one. That's why everything feels uncanny. And it's only going to get stranger, until we learn to name the thing we're actually doing. Which is a shame, because once we name it, once we see it for what it is, it won't be half as fun.

Arainach 1y ago
>When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection. Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability. It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and influence the thoughts and behaviors of others there is blame and there should be liability. Those who spread lies that caused people to storm the Capitol on January 6th believing an election to be stolen are absolutely partially responsible even if they themselves did not go to DC on that day. Those who train machines that spit out lies which have driven people to racism and genocide in the past are responsible for the consequences.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  "Words have no essential meaning" and "speech carries responsibility" aren't contradictory. They're two ends of the same bridge. Meaning is always projected by the reader, but that doesn't exempt the speaker from shaping the terrain of projection. Acknowledging the interpretive nature of language doesn't absolve us from the consequences of what we say. It just means that communication is always a gamble: we load the dice with intention and hope they land amid the chaos of another mind. This applies whether the text comes from a person or a model. The key difference is that humans write with a theory of mind. They guess what might land, what might be misread, what might resonate. LLMs don’t guess; they sample. But the meaning still arrives the same way: through the reader, reconstructing significance from dead words. So no, pointing out that people read meaning into LLM outputs doesn’t let humans off the hook for their own words. It just reminds us that all language is a collaborative illusion, intent on one end, interpretation on the other, and a vast gap where only words exist in between.
krisoft 1y ago
This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that. Just looking at my recent AI prompts: I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was looking for. How is this “divination”? I was looking for what is the g-code equivalent for galvo fiber lasers are and ChatGPT told me there isn’t really one. The closest might be the sdk of ezcad, but it also listed several other opensource control solutions too. Wanted to know what are the hallmarking rules in the UK for an item which consist of multiple pieces of sterling silver held together by a non-metalic part. (Turns out the total weight of the silver matters, while the weight of the non-metalic part does not count.) Wanted to translate the hungarian phrase “besurranó tolvaj” into english. Out of the many possible translations chatGPT provided “opportunistic burglar” fit the best for what I was looking for. Wanted to write an sql alchemy model and i had an approximate idea of what fields i needed but couldn’t be arsed to come up with good names for them and find the syntax to describe their types. ChatGPT wrote it for me in seconds what would have taken me at least ten minutes otherwise. These are “divination” only in a very galaxy brained “oh man, when you open your mind you see everything is divination really”. I would call most of these “information retrieval”. The information is out there the LLM just helps me find it with a convenient interface. While the last one is “coding”.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  Sure, some people stepped up to the Oracle and asked how to conquer Persia. Others probably asked where they left their sandals. The quality of the question doesn't change the structure of the act. You presented clear, factual queries. Great. But even there, all the components are still in play: you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted its relevance. That's divination in structural terms. The fact that you're asking about barbs on feathers instead of the fate of empires doesn't negate the ritual, you're just a more practical querent. Calling it "information retrieval" is fine, but it's worth noticing that this particular interface feels like more than that, like there's an illusion (or a projection) of latent knowledge being revealed. That interpretive dance between human and oracle is the core of divination, no matter how mundane the interaction. I don't believe this paints with an overly broad brush. It's a real type of interaction and the subtle distinction focuses on the core relationship between human and oracle: seeking and interpreting.
deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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msgodel 1y ago
This stuff wasn't an issue because older societies had hierarchy which checked the mob. In a flat society every individual must be able to perform philosophically the way aristocrats do.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  We're seeing the effects of the flat society not being able to do this. Conspiracy theories, the return of mysticism (even things like astrology seem to be on the rise), distrust of experts, fear of the other, etc.
mdp2021 1y ago
> we were honest I am quite honest and the subset of users that fill your description - unconsciously treating text from deficient authors as tea leaves - have psychiatric issues. Surely many people consult LLMs because of the value within their right answers, which exist owing to having encoded information and some emergent idea processing, and attempting to tame the wrong ones. They consult LLMs because that's what we have, limited as it is, for some problems. Your argument falls immediately because people in the consultation of unreliable documents cannot be confused with people in the consultation of tools for other kinds of thinking: the thought under test is outside in the first case, inside in the second (contextually). You have fallen in a very bad use of 'we'.
- awongh 1y ago
  > value within their right answers The thing is that LLMs provide plenty of answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric. Even in coding the idea of a "right" answer quickly gets fuzzy- should I use CSS grid or flexbox here? should these tables be normalized or not? People simply have an unconscious bias towards the output just like they have an unconscious bias towards the same answer given by two real people they feel differently about- That is, the sort of thing all humans do (even if you swear that in all cases you are 100% impartial and logical). I think the impulse of ascribing intent and meaning to the output is there in almost all questions, it's just a matter of degrees (CSS question vs. meaning of life type question)
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    > LLMs provide plenty of answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric I do not use them for that: I ask them for precise information. Incidentally, that one time in which I had to ask for a clever subtler explanation, it was possible to evaluate the quality of the answer - and I found myself pleasantly surprised (for once). What I said is, some people ask LLMs for information and explanation in absence of better and faster repositories - and it is just rational to do so. Those «answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric» are not relevant in this context. Some people use LLMs as <whatever>: yes, /some/ people. That some other people will ask LLMs fuzzy questions does not imply that they will accept them as oracles. > bias ... all humans do Which should, for the frame and amount in which the idea has some truth, have very little substantial weight and surely does not prove the "worshippers" situation depicted by the OP. You approach experience E in state S(t): that is very far from "wanting to trust" (which is just the twisted personality trait of some). > the impulse of ascribing intent and meaning [...] meaning of life First, of all, no: there seems to be no «intent and meaning» in requests like "what is the main export of Kyrgyzstan", and people who ask an LLM about the meaning of life - as if dealing with an intelligent part instead of a lacking thing - pertain to a specific profile. If you have this addiction to dreaming, you are again requested to wake up. Yes, we know many people who stubbornly live in their own delirious world; they do not present themselves decently and they are quite distinct from people radicated in reality. I am reading that some people as if anthropomorphize LLMs, some daemonize LLMs - some people will even deify them - it's just stochastics. Guess what: some people reify some other people - and believe they are being objective. The full spectrum will be there. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.
tim333 1y ago
Maybe LLMs can be divinatory instruments but that sounds a bit highbrow going by my use. I use it more as a better Google search. Like the most recent thing I said to ChatGPT is "will clothianidin kill carpet beetles?" (turns out it does by the way.)
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  Until it makes stuff up.
  - tim333 1y ago
    Well nothing's perfect. It actually got that one wrong - it said "not typically effective" which isn't true.
    - mort96 1y ago
      Nothing is perfect, but some things let you validate the answer. Search engines give you search results, not an answer. You can use the traditional methods for evaluating the reliability of a resource. An academic resource focused on the toxicity of various kinds of chemicals is probably fairly trustworthy, while a blog from someone trying to sell you healing crystals probably isn't. When you're using ChatGPT to find information, you have no information if what it's regurgitating is from a high reliability source or a low reliability source, or if it's just a random collection of words whose purpose is simply to make grammatical sense.
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        The most frustrating time I've had is asking it something, pointing out why the answer was obviously wrong, having it confirm the faulty logic and give an example of a portion of the answer now it would look like if it had used sound logic, followed by a promise to answer again without the accepted inaccuracy, only to get an even more absurd answer than the first time around.
- Zak 1y ago
bandoti 1y ago
Just as alchemists searched for the Philosopher’s stone, we search for Artificial General Intelligence.
duxup 1y ago
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"
  - pennomi 1y ago
    If you actually know the answer to this, you should probably publish a paper on it. The conditions that truly create intelligence is… not well understood.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      That's actually the point I was making. There's an assumption that the LLM is working differently because there's a statistical model but we lack the understanding of our own intelligence to be able to say this is indeed a difference.
      - freejazz 1y ago
        So? There is no more evidence to suggest they are the same than what you've already rejected here as evidencing difference.
        AlecSchueler 1y ago
        I know but I didn't claim they were the same, I simply questioned the position that they were different. The fact is we don't know, so it seems like a poor basis for building off of
voidhorse 1y ago
Great take. In my view, a major issue right now is that the people pushing these tools on the populace have never read Barthes and in many cases probably don't even know the name. If they had an inkling of literary and social history, they might be a bit more cautious and conscientious of how they frame these tools to people. We are currently subject to the whims of corporations with absurd amounts of influence and power, run by people who barely understand the sciences, who likely know nothing about literary history beyond what the chatbot can summarize for them, have zero sociological knowledge or communications understanding, and who don't even write well-engineered code 90% of the time but are instead ok with shipping buggy crap to the masses as long as it means they get to be the first ones to do so, all this coupled with an amount of hubris unmatched by even the greatest protagonists of greek literature. Society has given some of the stupidest people the greatest amount of resources and power, and now we are paying for it.
cratermoon 1y ago
This exact characterization was noted two years ago. https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
UncleOxidant 1y ago
You're getting some pushback about the analogy to divination, but I think most people here are reasonably technically literate and they assume that everyone else in society has the same understanding of how LLMs work that they do. When I chat about LLM usage with non-technical friends and family it does indeed seem as though they're using these AI chatbots as oracles. When I suggest that they should be wary because these LLMs tend to hallucinate they're generally taken aback - they had no idea that what the chatbot was telling them might not be factually correct. I hope this revelation changes their relationship with LLM chatbots - I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  Thank you. I really appreciated your comment. > I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles. Exactly. That phrase "meeting people where they're at" comes to mind. Less as a slogan and more as an pedagogical principle. It's not enough to deliver information, it's important to consider how people make sense of the world in the first place. Like you pointed out, the analogy to divination isn't meant to mystify the tech. It's meant to describe how, to many people, this interface feels. And when people interact with a system in a way that feels like consulting an oracle, we can't dismiss that as ignorance. We have to understand it as a real feature of how people relate to symbolic systems. That includes search engines, card catalogs, and yes, LLMs. This is one of the densest concentrations of AI-literate minds on the internet. That's exactly why I think it's worth introducing frames from outside the dominant paradigm: anthropology, semiotics, sociology. It's not to be sill or weird, but to illuminate things engineers might otherwise take for granted. It's easy to forget how much unspoken cultural infrastructure supports what we call "information retrieval." If a few comments dismiss that perspective as silly or unscientific, I don't take it personally. If anything, it reassures me I'm tapping into something unfamiliar but worth sharing and worth having deep discussion on. Thanks again for engaging in good faith. That's the kind of exchange that makes this place valuable.
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago
pjmorris 1y ago
An automated Ouija board!
timewizard 1y ago
> and search for wisdom in the obscure. There is nothing obscure about their outputs. They're trained on pre-existing text. They cannot produce anything novel. > We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture Utter nonsense. You've released a new search mechanism to _some_ members of _some_ cultures. > That's why everything feels uncanny. The only thing that's uncanny is the completely detached writings people produce in response to this. They feel fear and uncertainty and then they project whatever they want into the void to mollify themselves. This is nothing new at all. > it won't be half as fun. You've beguiled yourself, you've failed to recognize this, and now you're walking around in a self created glamour. Drop the high minded concepts and stick with history. You'll see through all of this.
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
Just to be sure: Sure: the Oracle of Delphi did have this entire mystic front end they laundered their research output through (presumably because powerpoint wasn't invented yet). Ultimately though, they were really the original McKinsey. They had an actual research network that did the grunt work. They'd never have been so successful if the system didn't do some level of work. I know you tripped on this accidentally, but it might yet have some bearing on this conversation. Look at the history of Ethology: It started with people assuming animals were automatons that couldn't think. Now we realize that many are 'alien' intelligences, with clear indicators of consciousness. We need to proceed carefully either way and build understanding, not reject hypotheses out-of-hand. https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-political-risk-consultants https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-p... (for an introduction to the concept)
sh34r 1y ago
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” - Carl Sagan
abaymado 1y ago
There have been a couple of instances, where I would try to debunk a conspiracy theory to a friend or family member and the next day, I would wake up to "Real/TikTok/Short" video with an AI narrating there exact argument. Most of the time, it's not even an LLM generated text turned to voice, rather an AI voice used to read a text the content creator has provided it. As long as it sounded like ChatGPT, Siri, "Her" combined with confirmation bias, people are treating these LLMs as their new oracles, as you may say.
knighthack 1y ago
While I love this insightful analogue, your statement seems exactly like the kind of text you copy-pasted from some LLM, which you then regurgitated to Hacker news with some modifications. It even ends with that trademark conclusion-style statement... which is a hallmark of ChatGPT output.

Arainach 1y ago

>When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection. Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability. It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and influence the thoughts and behaviors of others there is blame and there should be liability. Those who spread lies that caused people to storm the Capitol on January 6th believing an election to be stolen are absolutely partially responsible even if they themselves did not go to DC on that day. Those who train machines that spit out lies which have driven people to racism and genocide in the past are responsible for the consequences.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
"Words have no essential meaning" and "speech carries responsibility" aren't contradictory. They're two ends of the same bridge. Meaning is always projected by the reader, but that doesn't exempt the speaker from shaping the terrain of projection. Acknowledging the interpretive nature of language doesn't absolve us from the consequences of what we say. It just means that communication is always a gamble: we load the dice with intention and hope they land amid the chaos of another mind. This applies whether the text comes from a person or a model. The key difference is that humans write with a theory of mind. They guess what might land, what might be misread, what might resonate. LLMs don’t guess; they sample. But the meaning still arrives the same way: through the reader, reconstructing significance from dead words. So no, pointing out that people read meaning into LLM outputs doesn’t let humans off the hook for their own words. It just reminds us that all language is a collaborative illusion, intent on one end, interpretation on the other, and a vast gap where only words exist in between.

krisoft 1y ago

This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that. Just looking at my recent AI prompts: I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was looking for. How is this “divination”? I was looking for what is the g-code equivalent for galvo fiber lasers are and ChatGPT told me there isn’t really one. The closest might be the sdk of ezcad, but it also listed several other opensource control solutions too. Wanted to know what are the hallmarking rules in the UK for an item which consist of multiple pieces of sterling silver held together by a non-metalic part. (Turns out the total weight of the silver matters, while the weight of the non-metalic part does not count.) Wanted to translate the hungarian phrase “besurranó tolvaj” into english. Out of the many possible translations chatGPT provided “opportunistic burglar” fit the best for what I was looking for. Wanted to write an sql alchemy model and i had an approximate idea of what fields i needed but couldn’t be arsed to come up with good names for them and find the syntax to describe their types. ChatGPT wrote it for me in seconds what would have taken me at least ten minutes otherwise. These are “divination” only in a very galaxy brained “oh man, when you open your mind you see everything is divination really”. I would call most of these “information retrieval”. The information is out there the LLM just helps me find it with a convenient interface. While the last one is “coding”.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
Sure, some people stepped up to the Oracle and asked how to conquer Persia. Others probably asked where they left their sandals. The quality of the question doesn't change the structure of the act. You presented clear, factual queries. Great. But even there, all the components are still in play: you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted its relevance. That's divination in structural terms. The fact that you're asking about barbs on feathers instead of the fate of empires doesn't negate the ritual, you're just a more practical querent. Calling it "information retrieval" is fine, but it's worth noticing that this particular interface feels like more than that, like there's an illusion (or a projection) of latent knowledge being revealed. That interpretive dance between human and oracle is the core of divination, no matter how mundane the interaction. I don't believe this paints with an overly broad brush. It's a real type of interaction and the subtle distinction focuses on the core relationship between human and oracle: seeking and interpreting.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

msgodel 1y ago

This stuff wasn't an issue because older societies had hierarchy which checked the mob. In a flat society every individual must be able to perform philosophically the way aristocrats do.

UncleOxidant 1y ago
We're seeing the effects of the flat society not being able to do this. Conspiracy theories, the return of mysticism (even things like astrology seem to be on the rise), distrust of experts, fear of the other, etc.

mdp2021 1y ago

> we were honest I am quite honest and the subset of users that fill your description - unconsciously treating text from deficient authors as tea leaves - have psychiatric issues. Surely many people consult LLMs because of the value within their right answers, which exist owing to having encoded information and some emergent idea processing, and attempting to tame the wrong ones. They consult LLMs because that's what we have, limited as it is, for some problems. Your argument falls immediately because people in the consultation of unreliable documents cannot be confused with people in the consultation of tools for other kinds of thinking: the thought under test is outside in the first case, inside in the second (contextually). You have fallen in a very bad use of 'we'.

awongh 1y ago
> value within their right answers The thing is that LLMs provide plenty of answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric. Even in coding the idea of a "right" answer quickly gets fuzzy- should I use CSS grid or flexbox here? should these tables be normalized or not? People simply have an unconscious bias towards the output just like they have an unconscious bias towards the same answer given by two real people they feel differently about- That is, the sort of thing all humans do (even if you swear that in all cases you are 100% impartial and logical). I think the impulse of ascribing intent and meaning to the output is there in almost all questions, it's just a matter of degrees (CSS question vs. meaning of life type question)
- mdp2021 1y ago
  > LLMs provide plenty of answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric I do not use them for that: I ask them for precise information. Incidentally, that one time in which I had to ask for a clever subtler explanation, it was possible to evaluate the quality of the answer - and I found myself pleasantly surprised (for once). What I said is, some people ask LLMs for information and explanation in absence of better and faster repositories - and it is just rational to do so. Those «answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric» are not relevant in this context. Some people use LLMs as <whatever>: yes, /some/ people. That some other people will ask LLMs fuzzy questions does not imply that they will accept them as oracles. > bias ... all humans do Which should, for the frame and amount in which the idea has some truth, have very little substantial weight and surely does not prove the "worshippers" situation depicted by the OP. You approach experience E in state S(t): that is very far from "wanting to trust" (which is just the twisted personality trait of some). > the impulse of ascribing intent and meaning [...] meaning of life First, of all, no: there seems to be no «intent and meaning» in requests like "what is the main export of Kyrgyzstan", and people who ask an LLM about the meaning of life - as if dealing with an intelligent part instead of a lacking thing - pertain to a specific profile. If you have this addiction to dreaming, you are again requested to wake up. Yes, we know many people who stubbornly live in their own delirious world; they do not present themselves decently and they are quite distinct from people radicated in reality. I am reading that some people as if anthropomorphize LLMs, some daemonize LLMs - some people will even deify them - it's just stochastics. Guess what: some people reify some other people - and believe they are being objective. The full spectrum will be there. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.

tim333 1y ago

Maybe LLMs can be divinatory instruments but that sounds a bit highbrow going by my use. I use it more as a better Google search. Like the most recent thing I said to ChatGPT is "will clothianidin kill carpet beetles?" (turns out it does by the way.)

suddenlybananas 1y ago
Until it makes stuff up.
- tim333 1y ago
  Well nothing's perfect. It actually got that one wrong - it said "not typically effective" which isn't true.
  - mort96 1y ago
    Nothing is perfect, but some things let you validate the answer. Search engines give you search results, not an answer. You can use the traditional methods for evaluating the reliability of a resource. An academic resource focused on the toxicity of various kinds of chemicals is probably fairly trustworthy, while a blog from someone trying to sell you healing crystals probably isn't. When you're using ChatGPT to find information, you have no information if what it's regurgitating is from a high reliability source or a low reliability source, or if it's just a random collection of words whose purpose is simply to make grammatical sense.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      The most frustrating time I've had is asking it something, pointing out why the answer was obviously wrong, having it confirm the faulty logic and give an example of a portion of the answer now it would look like if it had used sound logic, followed by a promise to answer again without the accepted inaccuracy, only to get an even more absurd answer than the first time around.
Zak 1y ago

bandoti 1y ago

Just as alchemists searched for the Philosopher’s stone, we search for Artificial General Intelligence.

duxup 1y ago

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

AlecSchueler 1y ago
The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"
- pennomi 1y ago
  If you actually know the answer to this, you should probably publish a paper on it. The conditions that truly create intelligence is… not well understood.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    That's actually the point I was making. There's an assumption that the LLM is working differently because there's a statistical model but we lack the understanding of our own intelligence to be able to say this is indeed a difference.
    - freejazz 1y ago
      So? There is no more evidence to suggest they are the same than what you've already rejected here as evidencing difference.
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        I know but I didn't claim they were the same, I simply questioned the position that they were different. The fact is we don't know, so it seems like a poor basis for building off of

voidhorse 1y ago

Great take. In my view, a major issue right now is that the people pushing these tools on the populace have never read Barthes and in many cases probably don't even know the name. If they had an inkling of literary and social history, they might be a bit more cautious and conscientious of how they frame these tools to people. We are currently subject to the whims of corporations with absurd amounts of influence and power, run by people who barely understand the sciences, who likely know nothing about literary history beyond what the chatbot can summarize for them, have zero sociological knowledge or communications understanding, and who don't even write well-engineered code 90% of the time but are instead ok with shipping buggy crap to the masses as long as it means they get to be the first ones to do so, all this coupled with an amount of hubris unmatched by even the greatest protagonists of greek literature. Society has given some of the stupidest people the greatest amount of resources and power, and now we are paying for it.

cratermoon 1y ago

This exact characterization was noted two years ago. https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

UncleOxidant 1y ago

You're getting some pushback about the analogy to divination, but I think most people here are reasonably technically literate and they assume that everyone else in society has the same understanding of how LLMs work that they do. When I chat about LLM usage with non-technical friends and family it does indeed seem as though they're using these AI chatbots as oracles. When I suggest that they should be wary because these LLMs tend to hallucinate they're generally taken aback - they had no idea that what the chatbot was telling them might not be factually correct. I hope this revelation changes their relationship with LLM chatbots - I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
Thank you. I really appreciated your comment. > I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles. Exactly. That phrase "meeting people where they're at" comes to mind. Less as a slogan and more as an pedagogical principle. It's not enough to deliver information, it's important to consider how people make sense of the world in the first place. Like you pointed out, the analogy to divination isn't meant to mystify the tech. It's meant to describe how, to many people, this interface feels. And when people interact with a system in a way that feels like consulting an oracle, we can't dismiss that as ignorance. We have to understand it as a real feature of how people relate to symbolic systems. That includes search engines, card catalogs, and yes, LLMs. This is one of the densest concentrations of AI-literate minds on the internet. That's exactly why I think it's worth introducing frames from outside the dominant paradigm: anthropology, semiotics, sociology. It's not to be sill or weird, but to illuminate things engineers might otherwise take for granted. It's easy to forget how much unspoken cultural infrastructure supports what we call "information retrieval." If a few comments dismiss that perspective as silly or unscientific, I don't take it personally. If anything, it reassures me I'm tapping into something unfamiliar but worth sharing and worth having deep discussion on. Thanks again for engaging in good faith. That's the kind of exchange that makes this place valuable.
Kim_Bruning 1y ago

pjmorris 1y ago

An automated Ouija board!

timewizard 1y ago

> and search for wisdom in the obscure. There is nothing obscure about their outputs. They're trained on pre-existing text. They cannot produce anything novel. > We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture Utter nonsense. You've released a new search mechanism to _some_ members of _some_ cultures. > That's why everything feels uncanny. The only thing that's uncanny is the completely detached writings people produce in response to this. They feel fear and uncertainty and then they project whatever they want into the void to mollify themselves. This is nothing new at all. > it won't be half as fun. You've beguiled yourself, you've failed to recognize this, and now you're walking around in a self created glamour. Drop the high minded concepts and stick with history. You'll see through all of this.

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

Just to be sure: Sure: the Oracle of Delphi did have this entire mystic front end they laundered their research output through (presumably because powerpoint wasn't invented yet). Ultimately though, they were really the original McKinsey. They had an actual research network that did the grunt work. They'd never have been so successful if the system didn't do some level of work. I know you tripped on this accidentally, but it might yet have some bearing on this conversation. Look at the history of Ethology: It started with people assuming animals were automatons that couldn't think. Now we realize that many are 'alien' intelligences, with clear indicators of consciousness. We need to proceed carefully either way and build understanding, not reject hypotheses out-of-hand. https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-political-risk-consultants https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-p... (for an introduction to the concept)

sh34r 1y ago

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” - Carl Sagan

abaymado 1y ago

There have been a couple of instances, where I would try to debunk a conspiracy theory to a friend or family member and the next day, I would wake up to "Real/TikTok/Short" video with an AI narrating there exact argument. Most of the time, it's not even an LLM generated text turned to voice, rather an AI voice used to read a text the content creator has provided it. As long as it sounded like ChatGPT, Siri, "Her" combined with confirmation bias, people are treating these LLMs as their new oracles, as you may say.

knighthack 1y ago

While I love this insightful analogue, your statement seems exactly like the kind of text you copy-pasted from some LLM, which you then regurgitated to Hacker news with some modifications. It even ends with that trademark conclusion-style statement... which is a hallmark of ChatGPT output.