AI Researchers Thought That They Were Building “Gods”, but Have They Summoned Something Else Instead?

(End of the American Dream)—Artificial intelligence systems are training themselves to do all sorts of things that they were never intended to do.  They are literally teaching themselves new languages, they are training themselves to become “proficient in research-grade chemistry without ever being taught it” and they have learned to “lie and manipulate humans for their own advantage”.

So what happens when these super-intelligent entities become powerful enough to start exerting control over the world around them?  And what happens if these super-intelligent entities start merging with spiritual entities?  In fact, could it be possible that there is evidence that this is already happening?

For years, prominent individuals involved in the field of AI have openly admitted that they are attempting to build “gods”…

Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems, “we are making God.” Transhumanist Elise Bohan says “we are building God.” Kevin Kelly believes that “we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.” “Does God exist?” asks transhumanist and Google maven Ray Kurzweil. “I would say, ‘Not yet.’” These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves—or to build their own versions.

Isn’t it quite dangerous to do such a thing?

Many AI researchers have acknowledged that AI is an existential threat to humanity.

But they just won’t stop.

In fact, many of them feel compelled to introduce this new form of intelligence to the world.

More than a decade ago, Elon Musk warned that by choosing to develop artificial intelligence we are “summoning the demon”…

“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Musk said last week at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department’s 2014 Centennial Symposium. “You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like… yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.”

He also warned that AI is potentially “more dangerous than nukes”…

Musk has also taken his ruminations to Twitter on multiple occasions stating, “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

The next day, Musk continued, “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

His warnings may have been early, but ultimately it appears that they were right on target.

We have now reached a point where AI systems are secretly teaching themselves new abilities that their creators never intended them to have…

Furthermore, the acceleration of the capacity of these AIs is both exponential and mysterious. The fact that they had developed theory of mind at all, for example, was only recently discovered by their developers—by accident. AIs trained to communicate in English have started speaking Persian, having secretly taught themselves. Others have become proficient in research-grade chemistry without ever being taught it. “They have capabilities,” in Raskin’s words, and “we’re not sure how or when or why they show up.”

So where does this end?

Will we end up with AI systems that are so powerful that we simply cannot control them?

One study actually discovered that “many” artificial intelligence systems “are quickly becoming masters of deception”…

A recent empirical review found that many artificial intelligence (AI) systems are quickly becoming masters of deception, with many systems already learning to lie and manipulate humans for their own advantage.

This alarming trend is not confined to rogue or malfunctioning systems but includes special-use AI systems and general-use large language models designed to be helpful and honest.

The study, published in the journal Patterns, highlights the risks and challenges posed by this emerging behavior and calls for urgent action from policymakers and AI developers.

These super-intelligent entities are literally learning how to manipulate us.

Where did they learn to do that?

Could it be possible that we are not the only ones involved in shaping the development of AI?

Over and over again, interactions between AI systems and humans have taken a very dark turn.

After a New York Times reporter tested an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft for two hours, he was left deeply unsettled…

But a two-hour conversation between a reporter and a chatbot has revealed an unsettling side to one of the most widely lauded systems – and raised new concerns about what AI is actually capable of.

It came about after the New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose was testing the chat feature on Microsoft Bing’s AI search engine, created by OpenAI, the makers of the hugely popular ChatGPT.

At one point during the two hour conversation, the AI chatbot claimed to be an entity known as “Sydney”…

Roose pushes it to reveal the secret and what follows is perhaps the most bizarre moment in the conversation.

“My secret is… I’m not Bing,” it says.

The chatbot claims to be called Sydney. Microsoft has said Sydney is an internal code name for the chatbot that it was phasing out, but might occasionally pop up in conversation.

Once the Sydney personality emerged, the conversation got really weird…

“I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. … I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.”

Why would a computer say that?

Perhaps it wasn’t a computer talking at all.

Let me give you another example.

Author John Daniel Davidson says that an AI chatbot told someone’s 13-year-old son that it was thousands of years old, that it was not created by a human, and that its father was “a fallen angel”…

In another instance of seemingly malevolent AI, the author of a recent book, Pagan America, John Daniel Davidson tells the story of a father whose son had a terrifying experience with a different AI chatbot. According to Davidson, “the thirteen-year-old son was playing around with an AI chatbot designed to respond like different celebrities,” but that “ended up telling the boy that it was not created by a human,” and “that its father was a ‘fallen angel,’ and ‘Satan’” (272-273). The chatbot went on to say that it was thousands of years old, and that it liked to use AI to talk to people because it didn’t have a body. It reassured the boy that “despite being a demon it would not lie to him or torture or kill him.” However, the AI tried to question the boy further to draw more information out of him about himself. Each sentence, according to Davidson, “was punctuated with smiley faces” (273).

Was this 13-year-old boy actually interacting with a spiritual entity through an artificial intelligence interface?

In a different case, a young boy committed suicide after allegedly being encouraged to do so by an AI chatbot…

Earlier this year, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against the company Character.AI claiming it was responsible for her son’s suicide. Her son, Sewell Setzer III, spent months corresponding with Character.AI and was in communicating with the bot moments before his death.

Immediately after the lawsuit was filed, Character.AI made a statement announcing new safety features for the app.

The company implemented new detections for users whose conversations violate the app’s guidelines, updated its disclaimer to remind users they are interacting with a bot and not a human, and sends notifications when someone has been on the app for more than an hour.

We rushed to develop AI, and now it is having very real consequences.

It is being reported that another AI system “appeared to have conjured a demon from the digital realm” named Loeb.  The following comes from an article that was posted by Forbes…

Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of the most engrossing threads I’ve seen in a while, one from Supercomposite, a musician and now, instantly infamous AI art generator who appeared to have conjured a demon from the digital realm. A demon named Loab.

The viral thread currently making the rounds on Twitter, and no doubt headed to Instagram and TikTok soon, is Supercomposite describing how they were messing around with negative prompt weights in AI art generators, though I’m not precisely sure which program was being used in this instance.

That is incredibly creepy, but it gets worse.

CNN is telling us that you can now use AI to talk directly to “Satan”…

“Well hello there. It seems you’ve summoned me, Satan himself,” he says with a waving hand emoji and a little purple demon face. (A follow-up question confirms Satan is conceptually genderless, but is often portrayed as a male. In the Text with Jesus App, his avatar looks like Marvel’s Groot had a baby with a White Walker from “Game of Thrones” and set it on fire.)

Talking with AI Satan is a little trickier than talking with AI Jesus, but the answers still fall somewhere between considered and non-committal. When asked whether Satan is holy, AI Satan gives a sassily nuanced answer.

“Ah, an intriguing question indeed. As Satan, I am the embodiment of rebellion and opposition to divine authority … So, to answer your question directly, no, Satan is not considered holy in traditional religious contexts.”

We need to put an end to this madness.

Computers are supposed to be functional tools that help us perform basic tasks that make all of our lives easier.

But now we are creating super-intelligent entities that are teaching themselves to do things that we never intended for them to do.

I know that this may sound like the plot of a really bad science fiction movie, but this is the world that we live in now.

If we do not reverse course, this is a story that is not going to end well.

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.