Futurama predicted this.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.
Not going to lie, there's something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I'm not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it's akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn't experience any of that. Made me feel like I'm either deficient or they're delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I'd just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.
Is this about AI God? I know it’s coming. AI cult?
I've been thinking about this for a bit. Godss aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful...
In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.
A friend of mind, currently being treated in a mental hospital, had a similar sounding psychotic break that disconnected him from reality. He had a profound revelation that gave him a mission. He felt that sinister forces were watching him and tracking him, and they might see him as a threat and smack him down. He became disconnected with reality. But my friend's experience had nothing to do with AI - in fact he's very anti-AI. The whole scenario of receiving life-changing inside information and being called to fulfill a higher purpose is sadly a very common tale. Calling it "AI-fueled" is just clickbait.