Posted on 10/24/2025 1:18:41 PM PDT by little jeremiah
"The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations." —The Singularity Hub on "X"
Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . .
Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the chief lesson of the computer age, which is that the virtual is not an acceptable substitute for the authentic. So, we plunge deeper into realms of the un-real and the inauthentic. This turns into a quest to get something-for-nothing, and the unfortunate result of that old dodge is that you will end up with nothing, and that is exactly why we are at such a hazardous pass in the human project.
I apologize if the above seems too metaphysical. But that’s the scenery en route when a civilization flies up its own wazoo. Novelist Cory Doctorow has nicely labeled this the enshitification of daily life.
First of all, get this: A-I has already quit operating as-advertised. It has lost the “I” part. A-I does its thing by rapidly combing through the Internet to evaluate and seize information that you request. Increasingly, A-I colonizes the Internet with second-hand, third-hand, and so forth A-I-generated information. The more territory A-I seizes on the Web, and the more it trains itself on recursive feedbacks of its own garbage, the more distorted the output gets. As that occurs, A-I becomes increasingly abstracted from Reality, which is exactly what happens when a person goes insane. So, expect an exponential rise in incorrect content that would, in theory, become a pretty serious problem when you ask A-I to run things like systems we depend on, the electric grid, harvesting crops, warfare. . . .
Secondly, as that process runs, and probably before it gets very far, A-I looks like it will wreck the financial system, which, in turn, would crater the economy of everyday life — the ability of people to earn a living, buy stuff, support children, get food, and stay out of the rain. Zillions of dollars are being invested in A-I now and lately it is mainly what drives the capital markets. So far, alas, return on that investment is scant — actually, negative. The situation might never improve, and as the recognition hits, look out below. The only question is whether that happens before the central banks destroy the world’s currencies with money-printing.
One A-I application, robotaxi services such as Waymo, have never turned a profit. Will they ever? Doesn’t look good. Notice, too, that the elimination of cab-drivers means X-number fewer humans making a living to buy stuff (presumably made by other people in other jobs soon to be replaced by robots). Of course, that’s the self-replicating problem with all applied A-I in every field of employment. The more jobs eliminated, the fewer customers for anything. Please don’t tell me that guaranteed basic income fixes that problem.
In desperation — and due to certain weaknesses of human nature — another early attempt to monetize applied A-I turns out to be pornography: create your own personalized sex fantasy to-order. Companies are already producing the first rudimentary A-I sex robots, which, let’s face it, amounts to a masturbation industry. Why bother cultivating a real-live girlfriend when you can fall into the pre-heated silicone embrace of a Jennifer Lawrence simulation that will never talk back or ask for anything? You can easily see how that would result in a whole lot less human reproduction — of which there is already a signal shortage in Western Civ — meaning even fewer people to work at anything or buy anything or do anything, or simply be here in the pageant of Planet Earth.
The A-I pioneers managed to make the situation worse from the get-go. The Open A-I company’s Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Bard A-Is, and Facebook’s Meta A-I are all trained-up to be politically Woke-to-the-max, meaning on any given issue in the public arena their output is one patent absurdity or another. Note: last April, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Facebook when its chatbot reported out falsely that he had been on-the-scene for the Jan 6, 2021 US Capitol protest (he was in Tennessee that day). Facebook’s parent company, Meta, settled the case with Starbuck in August, 2025, for undisclosed terms and the company apologized publicly.
Two days ago, Mr. Starbuck sued Google for defamation (with malice and negligence) when it’s Bard A-I output alleged that he was a “child rapist,” a “serial sexual abuser,” that he abused and stalked his ex-wife (Starbuck states in his lawsuit that he has no ex-wife). It accused him further of fraud, embezzlement, drug charges, stalking business partners, and being a “shooter” or “person of interest” in a 1991 murder case (Starbuck was two years old at the time), of appearing in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs (untrue), working as a porn actor, and voicing support for the Ku Klux Klan.
The A-I cited non-existent news articles from outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Post, Rolling Stone, Mediaite, The Daily Beast, and Salon, along with fake URLs and headlines (e.g., “Robby Starbuck Responds to Murder Accusations”). Starbuck demonstrated this in a podcast episode on October 22–23, 2025, where he queried the A-I live.
Google spokesman José Castañeda attributed the issues to its A-I “hallucinating” — which tells you that the recursive feedback of garbage content in A-I is already well-advanced. Prepare for ever more interesting mischief, while you watch your portfolio of index stocks go up in a vapor.
Pinging the Howard Kunstler list; MtnClimber - let me know if there are more names.
You might try using it yourself—maybe for Bible conversations—before letting someone else tell you what it’s worth.
I’ve had some amazing discussions with GPT-4 and GPT-5 about faith and Scripture.
It may one day evolve into the brains of killer robots, but for now, it actually has some value.
I don’t really disagree with Kunstler’s general point. But it worries me that people often lump all AI together, seeming to throw the baby out with the bathwater; while there are many different types, different tasks those types are more suited to, etc.; and AI is already very much in use in a lot of technologies and services we depend upon.
The problem in America isn’t so much what people don’t know; the problem is what people think they know that just ain’t so.
— Will Rogers
So much of modern “knowledge” is untrue or just mere opinion. But people are so sure that they have all the facts — and their opponents are “Hitler”.
AI just combs through a lot of garbage on the internet and comes up with garbage conclusions.
But I still think AI can automate a lot of jobs. No real thought involved — just data transfer from here to there like people do. AI can manage that much without having to invent references from a non-existent Newsweek article.
Cmon they need all those porn folks in China - there is a shortage of women from decades of aborting female fetuses and infanticide.
Well said. See tagline.
I agree; A-I used for mindless tasks. But anything that requires consciousness - the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, right and wrong, etc - has to be done by living breathing human beings.
The issue I see with AI, as currently defined and constituted, is that it does not hinge on correctness for its value, but facility. Ai purportedly can take from reams of real on-line data (a budious concept in itself) and generate a reasoned, balanced answer to a complex question, with many sources that it can cite, and perhaps a bit of insight that is difficult to discern with human eyes.
However, AI has learned to hallucinate. It has fabricated unreal citations for its desired answer. In doing so, it created fictitious footnotes that do not pass a reasonable investigation.
Fictitious citations fabricated by AI have been used in term papers, and even in court cases. Because AI has the reach to get into otherwise unreachable data, humans believe the machine - despite the fact that the machine made it up out of whole cloth.
The current AI frenzy is all about the dreams of robots, as in “I Robot” by Aasimov.
How dedicated are you to investigating any citation not directly from the Bible? If the machine makes something up, do you know?
Not being argumentative, but AI has been known to fabricate some (in some cases, much) of its evidence for its stated position.
How many Bibles are there? As I understand it, several chapters were left out of the King James version.
I recently had a “discussion” with ChatGPT on a historical subject I have researched for years and know pretty much top to bottom. It cited a source for some data it had presented, which I was very dubious of. When I challenged it, it apologized profusely and then attributed the data to a totally different made up source. When asked where it got the data from originally, it finally admitted there was no digitized version available (hence unavailable to AI) and offered to give me the cite from the National Archives where I could request a copy.
It then started referring to the data as an “estimate” and when I challenged that it got all slippery and said it had amalgamated the data from still other sources (which also was an outright lie as I knew those sources well).
In response to another question, it gave the wrong author for a 25 year old magazine article - took me two minutes to find the article. I have no idea how it got this one wrong, but you would think the easiest thing in the world to do correctly is find an article and its author on the internet.
This is our future. What if I had believed its first answer? Those who claim it will get better don’t tell us ‘better at what?’ Better at making stuff up to sound authoritative.
For Bible discussions, all you have to do is click on blbclassic.org.
And if you study the Bible all the time, you know if it is making a mistake.
And it certainly makes mistakes. But then so do I.
It's a tool. If you're not using it, you're not an authority.
Wow - I’m not even sure which fallacies you are citing in your attack on my opinion.
No, I do not use AI to write anything. I prefer to know that my own sources are authoritative, and to not ask for a tertiary opinion from something (as opposed to someone) I do not respect.
I am a computer software specialist, in a safety-critical field. I am an expert in the guidance governing the approval of software used on airplanes. I would never use AI to advise me, because I am personally liable for any stupid mistakes (i.e.: Those mistakes arising from my own assumptions, as opposed to being deliberately misled).
You specifically limit the use of the tool to Bible study, an area where you are well educated. Your attack on my opinion is superfluous, because you assume all users are in your own position - researching areas where they are already expert, and without professional or monetary damages on the line.
I could care less your opinion of me, but I would caution you not to over inflate your opinion of yourself, and thereby sin in condemning another for having a different opinion.
Youtube is swamped with AI slop videos.
From the beginning of computing, we had GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
AI has made another problem clear and undisputable: GAGO: Garbage Algorithm, Garbage Out.
Any why does A.I. spew out massive “walls of text”, when the same thing can be said by a human in a couple of sentences?
If that isn't you, I apologize.
See tagline.
BTW, I am not an authority on AI. But I use it in my work for hours every day and it has multiplied my productivity by an order of magnitude. And since my work depends on accuracy, I am careful to confirm and test its output.
I am still pushing it to see what it can do. I subscribe to Grok and GPT and they are growing noticeably more powerful by the week.
Again, sorry for any inapplicable offense.
RoosterRedux, I did not mean this to be a personal challenge. I cannot use AI in my line of work due to liability issues.
I am glad you find it beneficial. My general concern is that “trusting” AI means not checking sources - which have been proven to be ficticious in several cases.
That’s a trust chasm that is hard to bridge, except in the gullible.
It makes mistakes all the time but it is like huge team of brilliant but naive assistants. You don't take what they say as gospel, but—once tested, confirm, and pruned— their contributions are pure gold.
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