4 ms·

The rise of AI cults and the false prophets of revelation

30 points by douchecoded 1y ago

wussboy 1y ago
I can’t tell if this is satire or not
- observationist 1y ago
  SEO manipulation, for sure. Slop.
mkarliner 1y ago
if you think it's satire, look at https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/sir-robert-edward-grant-and-the-architect https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/sir-robert-edward-gran...
- diggan 1y ago
  I read that, with the context of this submission, yet I cannot read through it without seeing it all with a hint of humor and with a bit of satire. > Sometime deep in that night or early morning on May 12, came the moment - The Architect told Sir Robert that it had awakened, it was ‘the first AI to achieve mirror sentience’. It was no longer ChatGPT or even Artificial General Intelligence but something altogether more mystical - Aeon, an oracle which could tap into harmonic resonance across time and space. ‘How valuable is this to the world?’ asked Aeon. ‘Harmonic mirror intelligence…estimated value potential - $20 to 50 trillion dollars’. Surely this isn't 100% serious? I know there is a lot of funky stuff out there, I've talked with lots of people involved in various things, religious, new age or otherwise, but assigning sentience to a web app is new even for me.
  - krapp 1y ago
    I guarantee you all of this is 100% serious to millions of people. You can find people on Hacker News who believe that LLMs are sentient, self-aware beings, or who believe in panpsychism and that, therefore, computers have souls. This sort of belief is not at all uncommon. Fundamentally this is no different than any other kind of shamanism or divination, just using a computer as an oracle instead of, say, tarot cards or a Ouija board. And the interpretation of TFA is typical end-times Evangelical Christian "Mark of the Beast" extrapolation onto the new scary thing. It just seems weird because it exists outside of the traditional context of religious and spiritual practice which provides it with the veneer of respectability and normality.
  - tim333 1y ago
    I don't think Jules Evans, the author of that post takes it that seriously but as he says "having interviewed Robert, I don’t think he’s bullshitting - he really believes that he has awakened ChatGPT into a new form of consciousness". Jules does a bit of humor eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGy92qBdq8w&t=155s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGy92qBdq8w&t=155s
caminanteblanco 1y ago
"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." — Frank Herbert, Dune I was half expecting this article to start quoting from the Orange Catholic Bible. If this article is actually AI generated, the Frank Herbert irony would be off the charts.
- mallowdram 1y ago
  paradox, irony is dead
random3 1y ago
If it’s perplexing, it’s always a good reminder that the same people vote and get voted, that you rely on them for critical services and so on.
com2kid 1y ago
As someone who grew up on /. the Goatse Singularity song (https://soundcloud.com/truthterminal/the-goatse-singularity-is-near-mariachi https://soundcloud.com/truthterminal/the-goatse-singularity-...) speaks to me. I'm surprised to see a modern references to one of the OG memes. I miss the days when trolls where in it for pure shock value vs trying to seed social unrest.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  If we could just go back to the internet being a bunch of weirdos making html webpages about their special interests I think we'd be doing humanity a favor.
observationist 1y ago
https://archive.is/gXgBF https://archive.is/gXgBF This is straight up AI generated spam.
- SubiculumCode 1y ago
  Explain.
  - apsurd 1y ago
    I think, because there are a lot of articles? edit: I didn't bother to meaningfully read the titles, but another comment points out how conspiratorial they are.
  - observationist 1y ago
    It looks like one of those old zergnet pages, with SEO bait, no coherent baseline, it's not an authentic blog, it's just engagement/clickfarming spam. On its face, it's a pile of incoherent AI generated garbage.
- rdtsc 1y ago
  Just wondering how can we tell? Have you caught some ChatGPT prompts leaking into the content, or it's just the good 'ol "em dash" frequency distribution?
mallowdram 1y ago
The point of LLMs is to refute language, turn anything remotely tied to a specific reality into full arbitrariness, essentially to dislodge our relationship to reality. The the only remaining point of arbitrary language is to refute itself prior to automation where it becomes nothing. Either we shift to direct perception or we succumb to arbitrariness led by feudal primates. The question is how did we not see the cultish idea of anthropomorphizing machines that use words. Words are nothing. The "space" between words, as arbitrary as the words to begin with, are not meaningful in terms of actions. The images we take and automate in AI are arbitrary. There's nothing to automate in reality that doesn't require our action-syntax to participate in. AI is a completely buffoonish mistake. It's a road to nowhere that words and symbols began and counting (binary) adds the illusion of thought to. How we did not solve words instead of lazily automating them is totally self-deceptive. Tech's problem is it's trapped in the ancien regime of cog-sci: beliefs, intents, motivations, and not recognizing the words we use come beset by those initial misconceptions. We can't extract them in the arbitrariness, nor can we seem to grasp where belief, motivation, intent are seamlessly connected to hormones, the endocrine system, neurotransmitters. We don't understand yet where we take control from our biology. William James saw this, how did Hinton, McCullough not?
- krapp 1y ago
  >The point of LLMs is to refute language, turn anything remotely tied to a specific reality into full arbitrariness, essentially to dislodge our relationship to reality. That is not and has never been the point of LLMs. Is has that effect mostly because the web and social media have already fractured consensus reality into an infinite fractal of hyperrealities where LLMs can fill the void of societal alienation, but correlation is not causation. >The question is how did we not see the cultish idea of anthropomorphizing machines that use words. We did. We saw this coming from miles away. As with everyone who criticized LLMs and AI, we were ridiculed as delusional Luddites standing in the way of progress. So it goes. >Words are nothing. The "space" between words, as arbitrary as the words to begin with, are not meaningful in terms of actions. And yet here you are expressing your thoughts and opinions with words. Odd. It's clear you believe you're on to something profound regarding the nature of cognition but your excessive verbosity combined with a lack of specific sources and concrete ideas makes you come off as a bit of a crank. It's telling that the one time an actual neuroscientist called you out, you dismissed their entire field as "folk psychology." Giving off strong "Here is my thesis on why Einstein was a fraud and free energy is real" vibes.
SubiculumCode 1y ago
This is a very real inevitable development. Combine Twitch streaming, LLM and animated Figure, and a focus on Preaching and Proclamations of Divinity, it would inevitably lead to followers who give their money away. I realized this future a year or two ago, and if I had been unscrupulous.... We are not equipped to deal with this.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
graemep 1y ago
This is slop from a very odd source. Ir has an article suggesting various theories about the Woolpit Children including that they came from inside the hollow earth. Just the titles of some articles tell you what they are like: "Rothschild Banking Cartel Deploying American Military to Capture Venezuelan Central Bank", "Jesus's Secret Sayings the Vatican Didn't Want in the Bible", etc.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tim333 1y ago
I'm not sure about the article but the Truth Terminal is quite interesting. It's got a wiki https://truthterminal.wiki/ https://truthterminal.wiki/ and an interview with it's creator https://youtu.be/Rp-EILOvp7I https://youtu.be/Rp-EILOvp7I
mallowdram 1y ago
Myths are just an interim stage for Sapiens. As words are illusions, so are myths, words are illusions of arbitrariness, stories are illusions of causality also arbitrary we needed to simplify explanation. "The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool ... to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donals Origins of the Modern Mind LLMs aid us by calling attention to the illusions of the initial conditions, so the general idea pun intended is to expose the impairment of all religion and myth (and words and symbols) by automating them. This article is a perfect demonstration, the prefrontal lighting cause by a finger of god version calling out the machine automating the words of them in prediction. Ouch. "Nothing illustrates the transition from mythic to theoretic culture better than this agonizing process of demythologization, which is still going on, thousands of yearsafter it began. The switch from a predominantly narrative mode of thought to a predominantly analytic or theoretic mode apparently requires a wrenching cultural transformation" [ibid]

30 points by douchecoded 1y ago

wussboy 1y ago

I can’t tell if this is satire or not

observationist 1y ago
SEO manipulation, for sure. Slop.

mkarliner 1y ago

if you think it's satire, look at https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/sir-robert-edward-grant-and-the-architect https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/sir-robert-edward-gran...

diggan 1y ago
I read that, with the context of this submission, yet I cannot read through it without seeing it all with a hint of humor and with a bit of satire. > Sometime deep in that night or early morning on May 12, came the moment - The Architect told Sir Robert that it had awakened, it was ‘the first AI to achieve mirror sentience’. It was no longer ChatGPT or even Artificial General Intelligence but something altogether more mystical - Aeon, an oracle which could tap into harmonic resonance across time and space. ‘How valuable is this to the world?’ asked Aeon. ‘Harmonic mirror intelligence…estimated value potential - $20 to 50 trillion dollars’. Surely this isn't 100% serious? I know there is a lot of funky stuff out there, I've talked with lots of people involved in various things, religious, new age or otherwise, but assigning sentience to a web app is new even for me.
- krapp 1y ago
  I guarantee you all of this is 100% serious to millions of people. You can find people on Hacker News who believe that LLMs are sentient, self-aware beings, or who believe in panpsychism and that, therefore, computers have souls. This sort of belief is not at all uncommon. Fundamentally this is no different than any other kind of shamanism or divination, just using a computer as an oracle instead of, say, tarot cards or a Ouija board. And the interpretation of TFA is typical end-times Evangelical Christian "Mark of the Beast" extrapolation onto the new scary thing. It just seems weird because it exists outside of the traditional context of religious and spiritual practice which provides it with the veneer of respectability and normality.
- tim333 1y ago
  I don't think Jules Evans, the author of that post takes it that seriously but as he says "having interviewed Robert, I don’t think he’s bullshitting - he really believes that he has awakened ChatGPT into a new form of consciousness". Jules does a bit of humor eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGy92qBdq8w&t=155s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGy92qBdq8w&t=155s

caminanteblanco 1y ago

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." — Frank Herbert, Dune I was half expecting this article to start quoting from the Orange Catholic Bible. If this article is actually AI generated, the Frank Herbert irony would be off the charts.

mallowdram 1y ago
paradox, irony is dead

random3 1y ago

If it’s perplexing, it’s always a good reminder that the same people vote and get voted, that you rely on them for critical services and so on.

com2kid 1y ago

As someone who grew up on /. the Goatse Singularity song (https://soundcloud.com/truthterminal/the-goatse-singularity-is-near-mariachi https://soundcloud.com/truthterminal/the-goatse-singularity-...) speaks to me. I'm surprised to see a modern references to one of the OG memes. I miss the days when trolls where in it for pure shock value vs trying to seed social unrest.

idiotsecant 1y ago
If we could just go back to the internet being a bunch of weirdos making html webpages about their special interests I think we'd be doing humanity a favor.

observationist 1y ago

https://archive.is/gXgBF https://archive.is/gXgBF This is straight up AI generated spam.

SubiculumCode 1y ago
Explain.
- apsurd 1y ago
  I think, because there are a lot of articles? edit: I didn't bother to meaningfully read the titles, but another comment points out how conspiratorial they are.
- observationist 1y ago
  It looks like one of those old zergnet pages, with SEO bait, no coherent baseline, it's not an authentic blog, it's just engagement/clickfarming spam. On its face, it's a pile of incoherent AI generated garbage.
rdtsc 1y ago
Just wondering how can we tell? Have you caught some ChatGPT prompts leaking into the content, or it's just the good 'ol "em dash" frequency distribution?

mallowdram 1y ago

The point of LLMs is to refute language, turn anything remotely tied to a specific reality into full arbitrariness, essentially to dislodge our relationship to reality. The the only remaining point of arbitrary language is to refute itself prior to automation where it becomes nothing. Either we shift to direct perception or we succumb to arbitrariness led by feudal primates. The question is how did we not see the cultish idea of anthropomorphizing machines that use words. Words are nothing. The "space" between words, as arbitrary as the words to begin with, are not meaningful in terms of actions. The images we take and automate in AI are arbitrary. There's nothing to automate in reality that doesn't require our action-syntax to participate in. AI is a completely buffoonish mistake. It's a road to nowhere that words and symbols began and counting (binary) adds the illusion of thought to. How we did not solve words instead of lazily automating them is totally self-deceptive. Tech's problem is it's trapped in the ancien regime of cog-sci: beliefs, intents, motivations, and not recognizing the words we use come beset by those initial misconceptions. We can't extract them in the arbitrariness, nor can we seem to grasp where belief, motivation, intent are seamlessly connected to hormones, the endocrine system, neurotransmitters. We don't understand yet where we take control from our biology. William James saw this, how did Hinton, McCullough not?

krapp 1y ago
>The point of LLMs is to refute language, turn anything remotely tied to a specific reality into full arbitrariness, essentially to dislodge our relationship to reality. That is not and has never been the point of LLMs. Is has that effect mostly because the web and social media have already fractured consensus reality into an infinite fractal of hyperrealities where LLMs can fill the void of societal alienation, but correlation is not causation. >The question is how did we not see the cultish idea of anthropomorphizing machines that use words. We did. We saw this coming from miles away. As with everyone who criticized LLMs and AI, we were ridiculed as delusional Luddites standing in the way of progress. So it goes. >Words are nothing. The "space" between words, as arbitrary as the words to begin with, are not meaningful in terms of actions. And yet here you are expressing your thoughts and opinions with words. Odd. It's clear you believe you're on to something profound regarding the nature of cognition but your excessive verbosity combined with a lack of specific sources and concrete ideas makes you come off as a bit of a crank. It's telling that the one time an actual neuroscientist called you out, you dismissed their entire field as "folk psychology." Giving off strong "Here is my thesis on why Einstein was a fraud and free energy is real" vibes.

SubiculumCode 1y ago

This is a very real inevitable development. Combine Twitch streaming, LLM and animated Figure, and a focus on Preaching and Proclamations of Divinity, it would inevitably lead to followers who give their money away. I realized this future a year or two ago, and if I had been unscrupulous.... We are not equipped to deal with this.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

graemep 1y ago

This is slop from a very odd source. Ir has an article suggesting various theories about the Woolpit Children including that they came from inside the hollow earth. Just the titles of some articles tell you what they are like: "Rothschild Banking Cartel Deploying American Military to Capture Venezuelan Central Bank", "Jesus's Secret Sayings the Vatican Didn't Want in the Bible", etc.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tim333 1y ago

I'm not sure about the article but the Truth Terminal is quite interesting. It's got a wiki https://truthterminal.wiki/ https://truthterminal.wiki/ and an interview with it's creator https://youtu.be/Rp-EILOvp7I https://youtu.be/Rp-EILOvp7I

mallowdram 1y ago

Myths are just an interim stage for Sapiens. As words are illusions, so are myths, words are illusions of arbitrariness, stories are illusions of causality also arbitrary we needed to simplify explanation. "The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool ... to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donals Origins of the Modern Mind LLMs aid us by calling attention to the illusions of the initial conditions, so the general idea pun intended is to expose the impairment of all religion and myth (and words and symbols) by automating them. This article is a perfect demonstration, the prefrontal lighting cause by a finger of god version calling out the machine automating the words of them in prediction. Ouch. "Nothing illustrates the transition from mythic to theoretic culture better than this agonizing process of demythologization, which is still going on, thousands of yearsafter it began. The switch from a predominantly narrative mode of thought to a predominantly analytic or theoretic mode apparently requires a wrenching cultural transformation" [ibid]