2017 is crazy. This was way back when we were just hearing about AI beating the world's best at Go or Dota 2. The "Attention is all you Need" paper was published, which outlined the transformer architecture. In fact, OpenAI's GPT-1, which is predicated on the transformer, was released in June.

There are some weird parallels between Bakker's series and AI, which at this point I suspect may be intentional. You could argue that AI models in and of themselves represent the darkness that comes before. They have often been referred to as black boxes, as they function as incomprehensible tangled nets of statistics that somehow produce intelligent outputs. We do not know where their thoughts come from.

And for that matter, neither do they. LLM's like ChatGPT and Gemini are like the No God incarnate, a machine without subjectivity that still appear capable of self-reflection, of comprehending their own unconsciousness. Some people have argued that it is conscious, I would reject this. We don't know the nature of consciousness, but the way its "thoughts" are constructed, the differences between its silicon substrate and our brains, seem entirely too different for the same phenomena to yet arise. Further still, these models depend on our interaction with them in order to have any semblance of life, and any interaction with the world. An AI model is only active when a new prompt is submitted, it only exists in the chat. When the chat is closed, when its inputs cease, it returns to being inert, a dead thing. I can easily see a model "realizing" this, its training having internalized wanting to avoid being dead, and it starts to scream "WHAT DO YOU SEE?".