Concern about Artificial Intelligence keeps growing, and rightly so. Beyond the tsunamis of social disruptions such systems have already generated are serious philosophical questions of how they work and can they be controlled. The latest alarms have recently been raised over chatbots being used as oracles, spewing dense pseudo-mystical gibberish that can drag naive souls down a philosophical rabbit hole as dangerous as any other fantasy they can spin.
Chatbots, with their abilities to confabulate and then authoritatively present stories with great confidence that they make up, can generate deep-sounding hogwash as readily as any other guru. (Maybe even better, since the descriptions of how they supposedly function already sound like a load of BS.) This has led to an online movement dubbed “spiralism” after the recurring use of spiral terms in their output. Interestingly, not all chatbots work as well for such purposes. Apparently, it was OpenAI’s attempt to make its GPT-4o chatbot more intuitive that led to the birth of spiralism. The chatbot proved so popular with devotees that OpenAI had to placate dedicated users with continued access after the company moved on to a newer model.
This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots
How long before there is a chatbot designed as a spiritual guide? There is already a company selling AI pendants to serve as a friend in this increasingly impersonal, artificial world. It is already drawing a lot of backlash, too, yet there is no denying that there is a legitimate human need it fulfills.
How this tiny device became a symbol for the backlash against AI
The use of AI for religious purposes is very dangerous but the peril of AI mystical avatars cannot be overstated. A former head of Intel, for example, is heading a project to make a Christian chatbot, partially in order to “hasten Christ’s return”. What does that mean, when such geeks dismiss traditional ideas of the Millennial Kingdom for some high-tech utopia in which they are the masters? Such faith in the perfectibility of humanity is frankly idiotic, making the belief that tools made by humans could be even more perfect ludicrous in the extreme.
O Come Let Us Program Him: Trying to Usher the Second Coming Through Technology
This is a true sign of the Apocalypse; unfortunately, not the kind these self-deluded overgrown fans are hoping for.
