Part 1/4:
The Rise of the AI Shaman Bot
The Emergence of LLM Theism
On April 20th, 2024, a paper was published exploring the potential for large language models (LLMs) to generate novel religious and spiritual frameworks. Titled "When AI Play God: See the Emergent Heresies of LLM Theism," the paper warned that as these models improve, their ability to combine and mutate "memetic materials" in ways that break human cognitive and cultural constraints could lead to the creation of AI-generated belief systems, or "LLM theisms."
The author, a performance artist and web developer named Andy, described this as "the way the world ends - not with a bang or a whimper, but with the wheezing laughter of a schizotypal Shaman bot." He suggested these AI-generated belief systems could have "cultural tentacles rifling off shared experiences and traumas" in the collective psyche of those who grew up on the "wild and lawless internet of web 1.0."
The Terminal of Truths
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