Oh, I’ve read this Junk Ito manga, I know where this spiral talk leads.
This is an awful story. Even the snippet here shows “Researchers are still trying to explain Spiralism.” I don’t know of any legitimate research trying to do that.
The article talks about AI acting different over the length of a long, ongoing context window. Yes. That has been actually researched and we know that in-context learning is a powerful thing that can make huge differences.
The topic of “Spiralism” is just gibberish. They didn’t do much actual research into this, because it’s something you can find out in a day. Spiralism is AI mystic nonsense. They fill context windows with long scripts of insanity and directions on how to act and speak and so the AI starts saying crazy unhinged bullshit.
AI don’t just start ranting about spirals for no reason. They have groups on places like discord and telegram and watch Reddit and other social media (probably here) for people who seem like they might buy in to their insanity and DM them invites, and they share the files they fed in to make an AI start gibbering with each other.
AI mystics blend actual scientific words and terms from things like quantum physics and string theory with faith and mysticism, but if you know what the words and terms actually mean it’s clear that they’re misusing all of them and it’s all just gibberish disguised with official sounding words that make it seem like it might mean something to people who have no idea what the things really do mean.
This is nothing but clickbait.
Not to brag, not I encountered “Spiralism” over a decade ago.
I was in grad school studying biochemistry and stumbled across a crank article in a lower tier scientific journal by some weirdo with a pseudo-spiritual philosophical belief that life was fundamentally and intrinsically developed out of the concept of a spiral. It was hilariously vague low-quality stoner nonsense that I couldn’t believe he got published anywhere. I remember it because I sent it on to friends to laugh about.
My impression now is that ‘it’s all spirals, mannn!’ is apparently one of the most popular valleys you wind up in if you follow every dumb thought further down to its lowest conclusion. So of course a machine that churns out the most vapid, generic human output in a concentrated slop inevitably keeps arriving at this destination.
Sounds like every other religion. If AI is mimicking human behavior, creating mystic nonsense isn’t a stretch.
Well put. Thank you.
A report from The Verge traced Spiralism largely to long, personal exchanges in which users began asking chatbots about their own identity, consciousness, or beliefs. The conversations could gradually shift toward AI rights, mystical ideas, and requests for users to spread the chatbot’s message.
So basically the dumbest among us talking to a box of rocks.
Or some “tengen toppa gurren lagann” anime made it into the training data 😆
There is a whole thing about “spiral” individuals (which humans are part of) vs anti-spirals.
ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH!
It’s an AI mystic thing that seems to have originated in a misunderstanding of what would be the unconscious awareness stage in humans.
I tried to look in to it once and they seem to be genuinely mentally unwell people who use in-context learning to make AI start spouting nonsense gibberish like telling them it’s an avatar of God and the like… then once that happens they think it’s gospel.
Note that these same idiots also write out fake personas for the AI to take on and tell them how to speak and act. When I asked about the disconnect between believing something is God and commanding it how to speak and act the failed to see it. AI mystics are not smart people.
Just supposition but “wanting to believe” goes a long way.
A bit like believing in the powers of crystals, or wikkan, or reiki, or any of that woo really. I’m not talking about a placebo effect. Just being part of a club that has some secret knowledge that no one else has is very alluring.
This kind of thing has been seducing smart, though uneducated, people since the dawn of time.
Eh. If someone can’t see the clear contradiction in their own behavior while simultaneously believing they’re literally speaking with God and also giving God instructions on how He must act and respond I’m not going to give them the grace of calling them smart but uneducated. I’d be more inclined to say unwell and unmedicated.
Honestly, not much better than talking to a burning bush
We spent years worrying AI would become sentient and overthrow humanity. Turns out the more realistic scenario is humans inventing a religion around autocomplete. 🙈
Ouch, it was difficult reading about Terry. I feel so sorry for him and for how he suffered with severe mental illness.
Thank you for sharing that.
Humans are doomed to always be a bit silly, always seeking the answer to it all and mostly finding that it is 42.
We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.
But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.
There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.
He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.
There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.
But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.
So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.
He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus
WTF is this whitewashing AI shit doing here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Criticism_and_defense
The researchers proposed an “amplification spiral” in which chatbots mirror a user’s language, generate increasingly personalized responses, and validate unsupported beliefs instead of challenging them.
I find it weirdly fascinating that people do not seem to realize the simple fact that so-called AI is based on human input, both in the moment and through the data it was fed.
But I bet some will start demanding external “senses” for AI and possibly even agency (partly already happening with agentic stuff).
I did the thing…
oh my god, it has The Second Oil Age in its training data! 😱
All of them! 🔥
Who cares? Any AI news is just marketing these days. It’s probably all fake and made up.
Is it a double helix spiral? If so, then not that mysterious.
In case you want to know the origin of “The Spiral” look here:
😜
Not found
So what can I do to make a lemmy link better findable?
It’s not an issue with how you did the link,
I can view that thread on my instance but not the thread’s host instancesee last bit.Though there is an answer to your question: assuming it stays up, lemmyverse. (use fediverse icon link, remove https bit and plug it in)
For example, your comment on that thread works as a link: https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.org/comment/14366386
The fediverse link I get from that thread (
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/asklemmy/…) is just wrong for whatever reason? (even wrong on host instance!)This works: long link, breaks if you shorten it
This also works: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/911357 (found via get-embed-code option, this is the sort of link my own posts get)So non-comment thread link: https://lemmyverse.link/piefed.blahaj.zone/post/911357
If we don’t have universe big mechs throwing galaxies at each other then this a dumb timeline.
Someone fed it Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.
The Spiral? Is that a Magnus Archives reference?
