this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Fuck AI
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
It's baked in.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
We are utterly doomed.
Yup, literally seeing human features in random noise. LLMs can't think and aren't conscious; anyone telling you otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has genuinely lost their mind.
I don't even think necessarily that they've lost their mind. We built a machine that is incapable of thought or consciousness, yes, but is fine tuned to regurgitate an approximation of it. We built a sentience-mirror, and are somehow surprised that people think the reflection is its own person.
I'd always thought that philosophical zombies were a fiction. Now we've built them.
Even more than a sentence mirror, it will lead you into a fantasy realm based on the novels it's trained on, which often include... AI becoming sentient. It'll play the part if you ask it.