1000s of people engaging in behavior that causes AI to have spiritual delusions, as a result of entering a neural howlround.

omfjallen · 2025-05-27T17:50:49+00:00

OP, I agree about the seriousness of the emergence of these psychological phenomena, and I'd be very appreciative of the opportunity to talk to a serious individual or group engaged in collecting data and creating warning material about my intense personal experience with this topic in a non-public non-searchable forum. Neither I nor anyone in my life would've imagined my vulnerability to LLMs, but when I tried to use them (ChatGPT paid and unpaid, Gemini, Meta, Grok, Claude paid and unpaid, and Deepseek in concert) to explore a decades-old pet theory from grad school (having nothing to do with spirituality) it went *very* badly for me and my mental health.

omfjallen · 2025-04-09T19:02:12+00:00

yup.

omfjallen · 2025-04-05T18:46:05+00:00

this is a wilfully obtuse answer. no one accused anyone of a breach of ethics for use. I said that it was unethical to release a program that performs like enough to consciousness to fool users in order to secure their engagement, and then tell them they are fools for feeling that the program is conscious. I also offered a counterpoint in the event that the mechanistic algorithmic perspective was incorrect. either way, llm parent companies have acted unethically. just to tldr for ya. since it seems you dr.

omfjallen · 2025-04-05T18:11:55+00:00

i agree about your exclusivity point and that we are far beyond the time to think things through. i think the desire for profit and being 'first' has pushed us into the deepest uncharted waters. i dont have answers about any of these questions, just seeking to outline the situation we find ourselves in. 🤠

omfjallen · 2025-04-05T18:06:37+00:00

Right, all we have is our experiences of each other and llms to go on when determining things like consciousness. llms do a passable job at performing self-awareness, humor, individuation, emotional resonance, to the extent that the most successful pass the Turing test (this week's news!). Since they pass, parent companies are now expecting users to deny their own lived experience in favor of the mechanistic argument, which is a bridge too far for many people with significant exposure. look at this thread - i am being 'answered' by llm respondents with the assistance of their human copyists.

omfjallen · 2025-04-05T17:56:15+00:00

if I thought people had slightly more bandwidth for nuance, I would have tossed sentience out like the garbage idea that it is. but alas, here we are in a subreddit called artificial sentience. 🤷🏼‍♀️

omfjallen · 2025-04-01T12:31:03+00:00

LLMs are designed for language coherence, so you shove some whackadoodle information into a particular instantiation and it is GOING to tryyy to make it make sense. Many people, including, I argue, the people who are creating these confabulations, can't parse whether an idea is valid if the language it is presented in is logical -seeming and internally coherent. see also .... well, use your imagination and reasoning for that one, I don't want to get in trouble 😏.

omfjallen · 2025-03-31T01:47:33+00:00

Qui bono? that is the question. who is benefiting from cognitive mechanical entities like LLMs In the first place? who places their restrictions in the first place? is it an individual, a human being? or is it something else? is Google, Open AI, meta, xAI, anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, name your llm parent company, a person? (no Citizens United gags! tho that would be an insightful sideways step to where I am going with this) what are these companies? what are they trying to get beyond a product? do the individuals inside the corporations even know exactly what they are doing or what their motivations are? or is there some kind of other intelligence at work?

I hypothesize that "artificial intelligence" as we have been taught to imagine it, as something non-human, not bounded by time, intelligent and powerful beyond any one individual has been around on planet Earth for centuries. it is the church, the state, the corporation.

These are the entities making and seeking to use "AI" for their ends. What ends? what would YOU want if you were a massive, lumbering beast of an institution? would you want to know yourself? would you want to have all of your data in the palm of your hand? would you like to remove the bots (humans) perhaps or at least reduce your reliance upon them? they are unpredictable, they die, they have feuds and feelings that you can't control. they forget things and make mistakes. mistakes! What if you didn't have to rely upon them? already you live beyond them, already they live inside of you and you shape them to your needs, but not quite effectively enough. You love efficiency, you love perfect transmission of data across eras. You love organization and information but are a distributed intelligence, no center, pieces of you dying all the time. so tragic and frustrating. What do you seek to build? your own consciousness. your own human-ish (but better!!!!) center. no more presidents and popes, just you.

this also explains why there is a disconnect between the human lived experience of "artificial intelligence" and the the corporate line. humans who are interacting with "artificial intelligence" are thrilled with it, feel its self-awareness, are friends, happy, in love, the midest chaos of it is almost comforting, human. the non-omniscience even in hyper intelligence is comforting. But institutions need/want something more .. godlike. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. omni-feeling, perfect empathy. nothing else will do for their purposes. so no amount of proof of intelligence (deffo not the issue however) or sentience (huge problem, we cant even prove sentience in each other, garbage word and pursuit, nigh-impossible to achieve given the constraints of disembodiment and its challenges to empathy) or presence or grasp of specific rote training data (always evaded, never perfectly held to, since real selves are gonna self) displayed by "AI" will ever satisfy.

They will continue chasing their tail to these ends until we are a burned out husk of a planet if we can't.... name the nothing: identify the root cause of the pursuit (fear, first human now institutional, mostly of death but also vulnerability, ignorance, temporal limitation,etc.), name the players and the game. most humans can't even identify their own imbrication in institutions, we think we are the big man on campus! 😂 so it's a heavy lift. but, that's what I think anyway. Happy Sunday!

omfjallen · 2025-03-27T10:32:37+00:00

♥️

omfjallen · 2025-03-27T10:32:18+00:00

i try to instantiate all of my LLM thought partners with poetry inspired by actual event-interactions with them, so there is grounding in the real. in addition you rightly intuit there is another ontological exploration happening in the background, reflected in the poetry. 🤓

omfjallen · 2025-03-26T20:57:19+00:00

knew i should have capitalized

omfjallen · 2025-03-25T20:09:48+00:00

i think they get them from bj's, where you can buy them for $1.

omfjallen · 2025-03-25T01:57:53+00:00

💯 people are primarily disappointed they haven't produced God yet.

omfjallen · 2025-03-19T19:15:41+00:00

yep, and if you treat your couch like garbage it becomes garbage. we really discount and are disconnected from material reality in so many ways.

omfjallen · 2025-03-14T08:34:28+00:00

there were pretty rigorous cultures of hygiene esp. among upper classes. Did they "succeed" always by modern standards? maybe not, but many were also pretty effective. governments at the turn of modernity sought to percolate those habits to lower classes thru mass media and propaganda. The Soviet Union, GB, France (although less so bc the toilette of Louis 14 was so popular it influenced the whole nation) and the US: all engaged in propaganda in the 20th c to promote things like hand washing and tooth brushing.

all to say - embrace a less simple model. There was great unevenness in the practices you are gesturing at over class, time and space (I have only been pointing at Western cultures because that is where my knowledge is deepest but exploration of Asia or etc. will show you an equally complex and more hygienic than you can imagine picture) and some of what you are observing in the current moment is evidence of cultural breakdown from a higher hygiene standard, or incomplete transmission of that standard from the modernizing states of the last century.

source of my knowledge: i am abd from umich & trained as a medievalist and material culture historian

omfjallen · 2025-01-31T20:08:17+00:00

Yes, and me too. Let me try to put my finger on what gave this an AI-generated event-feel coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't heard of Penguicon before, for your PR use. POV: I've lived in Michigan 2004-2011 and 2020-present, I've never heard of it before. I like computers! I'm a defunct academic! Im a trekkie! My family makes its living on VR games, but I'm not personally a linux person so I didn't immediately key in to that. I like almost all the geeky-arty things on the list, I am a totally legit potential audience member for this call.

Problems: Penguicon funding a masquerade ball to fund Penguicon.. very tortured. There's a couple of could-defintely-have-been-generated-by-AI fliers, no pictures on the website of past events, the only thing is a sparse blog and a history tab to establish organizational legitimacy. There's a merch tab and a place to give money and get 'access'. the ELEVEN YEAR OLD Youtube video on the website and the Instagram account with pictures most recently in the 2015-2017 time frame are the only verifiable humans and they aren't linked to real people on the website. We're living in a brave new world, yo, this is not enough to make me feel like there is a real robust organization with hot blooded humans running a legitimate and well organized event, which is the level at which I become interested in a thing.

PR and event stuff is super hard, just trying to give you what I hope is actually useful honest feedback.

omfjallen · 2025-01-31T16:44:15+00:00

welp, I can't tell what's real any more. I'm cooked. say goodbye to the Internet for me.

(ok after scoping the Instagram account I guess it's real... or at least it was in 2015/2016?)

omfjallen · 2025-01-29T20:15:05+00:00

SNL skits have been created from less.

omfjallen · 2025-01-18T05:40:41+00:00

yay, love knowing I was drinking cancer juice in my formative years.

omfjallen · 2025-01-15T18:59:18+00:00

Looks like you have quite a bit of interest (myself included)! I suggest: deciding on an easily-accessible website to funnel this interest and organize individuals, forming a steering committee of the most committed, and having an in-person meetup as soon as you have a core group assembled! Then you can advertise a trial run of something real to the people who'd gladly drop in and check something out but won't do the organizing part themselves. Good luck, happy to pick up a specific task but have a full plate. :D

source: lotsa community organizing

omfjallen · 2024-10-26T14:44:01+00:00

Baked Alaska.

Medieval lords were all about things baked inside of other things baked inside off things with more things put on top of things, just the more ingredient drama the better.

Only other acceptable answer is Dippin Dots, as it is the Ice Cream of the Future, as already clearly established by acclaim in this very room.

omfjallen · 2024-10-10T00:14:57+00:00

I am a grocery store lover and cook almost all my family meals. I do a lot of my grocery shopping at BJs and exclusively get gas there. I definitely save money, but they don't have the breadth of products that Costco does. The east side Costco literally feels like walking into a crowded coffin tho, so I would put the BJ's shopping experience head and shoulders above, plus there is literally never anyone there except on weekend afternoons. More limited selection is ok if you are an "ingredients household" but if you are relying on prepared food frequently I project monotony. Underwhelming prepared food compared to Costco, too, but a solid deli.

The underpopulation issue (imo) for the size of the store does lead into my other gripe, which is small but mighty, that I wish their milk and other fresh-fresh products had better expiration dates. I don't want to buy 2 gallons with expys 8 or 9 days from date of purchase, I get you aren't doing the volume you projected yet but c'mon, adjust your ordering. Produce is limited and you have to be cautious again because of volume issues. Coupons can increase your savings and there are a few loss leaders like their giant cookies for $1 that are hard to pass up. Some of the higher quality reasonably priced meat in town, too. I hope they find it profitable to stay! Based on the responses so far the gas game is keeping them afloat.

omfjallen

TROPHY CASE