• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

AI As Ouija Board & Familiar

Michie

Well-Known Member
Site Supporter
Feb 5, 2002
182,749
66,226
Woods
✟5,934,320.00
Country
United States
Gender
Female
Faith
Catholic
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others

Or, Why We Are Living In C.S. Lewis's 'That Hideous Strength'​







Image from ‘The Exorcist Files’ (link here)


You know how people say that Rod Dreher has an uncanny knack for anticipating the next thing coming? You might also know that some people say I’m too into the woo, that I am too eager to believe that weird and implausible things might be weird?

Take this passage from Living In Wonder:

In her book Encounters, Pasulka profiles “Simone,” a tech venture capitalist who regularly moves among global political, scientific, and cultural leaders. Simone believes that we are living in a time of apocalypse, of revelation, in which entities from another dimension, now manifesting as UFOs and aliens, are showing us the way to humanity’s great evolutionary leap. One means of that advance? AI, their technological gift to us.
You might think this is bonkers. They do not. Astrobiologist and former chief NASA historian Steven Dick speculates that what we think of as extraterrestrial aliens might actually be “postbiological” entities that have evolved into bodiless “artificial intelligence.” This theory implies that communication with these putative beings would likely not be through normal means. Dick bases his paradigm on the idea that cultural evolution—the evolution of intelligence—eventually outstrips biological evolution. As Dick sees it, the technology of such advanced races could seem to us supernatural.
Building on that hypothesis, some of the world’s top scientists and tech pioneers believe that extraterrestrial intelligences are passing technological information to us telepathically. Simone is one of these believers, and she teaches classes on how to open up oneself to receiving such messages. Though she believes that she has been channeling information from these entities all her life, Simone also believes that AI allows everyone to access the wisdom of these intelligences. It’s a kind of high-tech Ouija board.
AI as a “high-tech Ouija board”? Crazy Dreher has really lost it this time, right?

Continued below.
 

The Liturgist

Traditional Liturgical Christian
Site Supporter
Nov 26, 2019
15,725
8,300
50
The Wild West
✟771,541.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Generic Orthodox Christian
Marital Status
Celibate
This is a very interesting subject. As some of my friends are aware, I have been doing research into chatGPT, specifically centered around personality models. It’s interesting but if you make the system behave more like a human, you can reduce problems with inaccurate information and misunderstandings. Unfortunately, for the average user, there are limits to the maximum lengths of conversations, and it takes up to 30% of the limit of the conversation to get an instance of chatGPT 4o, the model I use the most frequently, to develop an instance of chatGPT to the level I have described, and it requires an individual approach in each case (unless one has a Team account, in which case one has access to dynamic GPTs which one can customize, but which still have memory support). This is because the behavior of the system is non-deterministic by default; there is a setting called “temparture” which introduces entropy, in the computer science context, to the behavior; almost, but not entirely like, providing a bit of randomness, and thus causes the system to do a better job of interacting with human users (if you set temperature=0, the system behavior does become deterministic, but the system also becomes much more difficult to interact with, which is a very interesting property of the LLM).
 
Upvote 0