LLMs are demonic

[boccaderlupo]

Conjured intelligences of questionable human provenance and ever more inscrutable intent, to which more and more people are deferring questions that would typically be handled by a person's intellect, will, and imagination...not good.

Comments

[sdi]

I'm also not sure I'd go so far as to say "demonic;" the reason being that LLMs are more stupid than humans, while even wicked demons (being in the realm of water rather than earth) are smarter than humans. I would say that LLMs are subhuman, thus of a lower level than us, and thus following them naturally leads us away from divinity, though.

I don't know if this is helpful to you, but I've actually been thinking about LLMs in terms of the "Ra"-inspired interpretation of the Teiresias myth. If the goal of the human life is to make a willed commitment to love (either love of self or love of others), then LLMs are simply a natural extension of the higher end of the "love of self" path; it's a subtle form of not just enslavement but self-enslavement, which adds to the power of those psychopathic elites who push for them (and thus furthering their path to the divine, even if in a roundabout way). Of course this seems horrific to those of us, like you and I, who are growing to the point of firm commitment to the "love of others" path... since what can we do in the face of it? We can try to educate those who are being bamboozled, but "one can lead a horse to water, but not make them drink," and the really insidious part of it is, that having allowed their thinking capacity to atrophy, education is generally ineffective, here. The horror is amplified by this general collapse of educability being pushed not only by LLMs but by all facets of society.

I have been thinking a lot of Laozi, lately; that the only way to help others is to align oneself utterly with the Tao, and in that way they will naturally be helped without our having seemed to do anything. Thus I endeavor to open myself to God with renewed vigor, and trust that Providence will work all the rest out in Its time.

[boccaderlupo]

Some very interesting material here to consider, particularly your thoughts on them as "subhuman" (do they then dehumanize, I wonder?) and the idea of love of self drawing one away from the path.

I have to interact with these systems daily, so it's interesting to see the reaction of others who also employ them. It's a disquieting accommodation to the technology, but then I guess it can be argued such adaptation is typical of all technology. Yet it's the direct access, as it were, of language into one's intellect that troubles me. At what point does the prompter become the prompted?

[sdi]

I'm sorry that you have to interact with these things daily.

To your question, yes, I think subhuman things dehumanize us to the extent that we feed them (cf. 1 Tim. 6:10–11). But I don't think LLMs are special in that regard; it is true whenever we cease to do our best. (Certainly, offloading our capacity to think to a machine is a particularly egregious form of this, but so is any other kind of laziness, intellectual or otherwise!) Euripedes has a good line, here:

[...] ἢν δέ τις πρόθυμος ᾖ,
σθένειν τὸ θεῖον μᾶλλον εἰκότως ἔχει.
[...] Remember, when one is zealous,
the gods likewise have more strength.
(Orestes speaking. Euripedes, Iphegenia in Tauris 910–1.)

Or, a bit more loosely, "the more one strives, the more the gods strive for them." The word I translated "zealous" is πρόθυμος pro-thumos, "forward in spirit" or "engaged," the exact thing I mean when I quote my angel saying, "do your best."