Little Sparkles and Skincare

Chat GPT, The Met Gala, Charles Williams, and Jesus

File: The Fall of Lucifer RMG BHC0706.tiff - Wikimedia Commons—He probably just fell straight into the Large Language Model or Meta or Whatever

On my Monday live stream, I blithely suggested we refer to any AI “help” as a jinn, or a Tiny Stupid Demon (TSD not to be confused with TDS). I thought it would clarify matters if, instead of saying, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write me a sonnet in the voice of Shakespeare about this ham sandwich,’ it would be better to say, ‘I asked the demon to write me a sonnet in the voice of Shakespeare about this ham sandwich.’ Sure, it’s all technology, there’s not some little being down in there, like Terry Pratchett’s Dis-Organizer of the Discworld series, but still, there’s got to be a way to remind oneself that these things are not morally or spiritually neutral—whatever they are. If we use them, we should be quick to count the cost and be able to see when they veer into the realm of darkness, corruption, lies, and blithering idiocy.

Shortly thereafter, like later that afternoon, a lovely person pointed me to this Rolling Stone piece published on Sunday. It’s called “People Are Losing Their Loved Ones To AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies: Self-styled prophets are claiming they have ‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.” It’s quite long, and if you want to freak yourself out, I commend it to you. I plucked a few bits out to give you a flavor of what’s happening out there in the wild hinterlands of bots, algorithms, and other horrors.