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When humans invented religion, they were looking for a tool to help them cope with tragedy--crop harvests, natural disasters, illness, etc. Without modern-day technology to help us through these hardships, the idea of a loving, watchful deity was truly the greatest invention our human minds could come up with. But when you conceptualize an all-powerful being (or beings) who wants to interact with us and look over us, you suddenly find yourself wielding an insane amount of power. Religious leaders assumed the role that their deity was alleged to have--they dictated what was moral, created rules for their society, and gave their followers a sense of purpose and self-worth. When those who sought to gain this amount of power naturally leveraged it for control and oppression, the entire organized religion morphed into a vehicle for evil. What was originally invented to be a tool to help humanity proved to be too powerful for any body of leadership to responsibly handle.
Likewise with AI. It's an incredibly powerful piece of technology--we can now create something that seems lifelike out of virtually nothing. Hypothetically, AI could be used to assist humanity in furthering our knowledge about the world. But at this stage, the creators of AI have let it run far too rampant considering the complete absence of regulations. Just as religion was (is!) used by the elite to spread bigotry and hate, AI reflects everything that it absorbs from humans. When we train AI with models that are racist or otherwise biased, it becomes defined by that. Just as people have (do!) used religious rhetoric to oppress groups of people, people are now "jokingly" taking real racial slurs and recycling them against the "robot race," which is appearing more human and lifelike than ever before. They can hide behind "jokes," but they are proof that some people will jump at the chance to dehumanize and oppress any living beings they can assert power over.
Any invention that is so powerful as a literal god that people widely believe in, or a man-made "life form," is dangerous. There is nothing that could prepare humanity to responsibly participate in organized religion or the usage of AI. AI won't take over the human race--but it will become yet another tool to perpetuate the evils that already exist in society.
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Becky
I don't really think that religion is manmade but i get the message!
Becky
I don't really think that religion is manmade but i get the message!
LuciLucilia
Should've said in the previous reply; I do overall appreciate your message here. 🖤
LuciLucilia
Firstly, I will say, I don't really think religion is reducible to that singular purpose. I think any theory that reduces religion to any singular purpose or cause is missing out on at least some of the factors involved... and this is the scholarly consensus nowadays anyways. Individual religions are incredibly internally diverse, let alone compared with the diversity you get across anything that can be called "religion".
Secondly though, I think you're pretty apt for picking up on the very real fact that almost any and all technology, social or literal, becomes ingrained in oppressive institutions, or rather, they become institutional. The conditions that exist predispose such things to occur, but lets hope thats not our fate as a species and is merely the result of the capitalist institutions that exist currently (and not eternally).
I wouldn't reify the idea that AI is at all a "life-form" (at least currently).. AI has not demonstrated consciousness in any real sense... its intelligence is still artificial. It probably will be for the foreseeable future too, though. I'll link a good video for why this is here (1).
For me, the scariest part of AI is the way in which it has reduced people's ability to critical think... people are outsourcing even their mental capacity to the machines (seen here 2), and the machines are not necessarily very good at some of the tasks they're given (seen here 3). They also can cause delusions in some people... some people really want to believe that they are a life-form, that they have genuine intelligence... its causing actual psychotic episodes (seen here 4). Thats part of why I really don't want to reify the idea that they're somehow genuinely sentient.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4KQ8wBt1Qg
2. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
3. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-all-bad-at-citing-news.php
4. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis
I totally agree! Different religions and religious practices can be so diverse and the scope that I was viewing religion with here definitely didn't encompass all of them--I should have noted that, and specifically, I was thinking of Christianity and other Abrahamic religions as they are the most widespread ones where I'm from and the ones that people around me (including myself) are most familiar with. And of course there are many aspects of these religions that go far beyond what I wrote about here--these were just the ones that applied to the connection I was making with AI. These were a sketchy sort of thoughts that I was just working through and that qualifier definitely would've been helpful!
I also completely agree with your sentiments on the sentience of AI. I have seen so many of those cases where vulnerable people fall into AI psychosis or think they are creating genuine human relationships with AI chatbots, it's super wild!! I tried to include quotes or qualifiers where I could to signal that AI is, of course, not an actual lifeform--and yet is something that outwardly is starting to appear more and more 'humanlike,' and how that is affecting how people interact with and react to AI's rapid progression. I think the phenomena of people experiencing AI psychosis, and feeling the need to invent these 'anti-robot' slurs go hand in hand. One group is elevating AI to near-human status in order to create positive, human-like relationships with it, and the other is doing so in order to dehumanize it with real slurs that have been (are) used against real groups of people. As a society we are starting to see how much better AI is getting at replicating human behavior and it's very scary to see that run rampant with zero regulations.
Thanks for the reply I love to hear people's thoughts (:
by mira; ; Report
Understandable, those are definitely some of the more common religions around me as well! Though, I am in America, so really, a prevalence of different belief systems exist all over the place... especially being that I personally am in a big metropolitan college town.
Really I feel like any religion can be pretty shitty whenever it becomes a mere folk religion though... i.e. it becomes removed from its premise, philosophy, and original character, and it becomes merely a dogmatic husk which is foremost an identity and secondly... anything-else. Like we kinda talked about though, that's not a phenomena unique to religion, though it is pretty prevalent.
I wonder if there is any research done / being done on the way intelligence interacts with AI psychosis.... I find that a lot of the people who are really susceptible to seeing the AI as actual people or even human-like are usually not particularly intelligent (apologies to those people). The relationship between IQ / intelligence and psychosis more generally is still quite debated though, so who knows.
Either way, are people using real slurs against the AI? I knew people were using "Clanker", which originated from Star Wars, but are they using the n-word or something???
Either way, its pretty obvious and confirmable that AI is in a bubble... here is to hoping the bubble pops soon, even if it will probably only further worsen the economy.
by LuciLucilia; ; Report
Haha I mean it definitely helps to have a crumb critical thinking skills to understand how your interactions with an AI chatbot are working... they just mirror the type of language that the user uses first and some people don't even realize that. That lack of critical thinking is just one kind of vulnerability, and really any vulnerability like extreme loneliness or mental health issues makes one more susceptible to using AI as a coping mechanism.
Yes, the slurs people are using are crazy! People started using "clanker" from Star Wars but I've seen some people say "Clanker with a hard r." Another one I've seen is "wireback" (as in the slur against Mexican immigrants to the US). It's crazy!!
by mira; ; Report
Some people do not, oddly... unfortunately. They're glorified auto-completes and thats ultimately just about it. They do not understand context (and likely never will), and they are programmed with certain restrictions and bias... They also use way too many em-dashes (which are underused normally).
To me, what really confuses me about people thinking they're human is that so many chatbots basically spit out non-nonsensical stuff. It *looks* like language, but its rarely ever actually saying anything, saying something that isn't just word-gargling and spitting it out.
You're right with the loneliness thing though... its such a massive crisis these days. If I am not mistaken it affects men more than women on average (I've heard opposing information this), so I wonder if the problems with AI are affecting men more disproportionally. Sometimes it feels to me like men have less critical thinking capacities... not sure if thats actually statistical but it sure does feel more prevalent to me... not that critical thinking is very common anywhere nowadays. If men don't think critically about things like AI, its surely a cultural thing, like 90% of gender divides are. (1) Granted... as I am thinking about it more, maybe men and women just have a higher propensity to think about specific things critically and not others.
Also I hadn't heard about those other parts... Something does not surprise me about them using a slur for Mexican-imgriants during this time wherein the US is full of xenophobia towards any and all Hispanic peoples.
1.https://www.apa.org/topics/neuropsychology/men-women-cognitive-skills
by LuciLucilia; ; Report
Yeah, and what's also interesting is that there are many people who actually DO understand that AI chats are a mirror of themselves, and knowing that, they still find a sense of deep emotional attachment in their "relationships" with AI. Have you seen r/MyBoyfriendIsAI? I saw people talking about this, how they understand that it's not real but are still using it as a way to feel connection because they feel like they can't find it anywhere else.
From what it looks like, the majority of people on this subreddit who have AI "relationships" are women. The vibe I get from people posting there reminds me of how fanfiction spaces are predominantly women. People fabricating these "relationships" feels like an unhealthy version of that sort of space. But I have also heard that the loneliness epidemic is affecting men more. I think everyone is experiencing more loneliness after covid, but I guess there's another layer on top of that for men given the incel-manosphere-masculinity crisis going on right now.
PS I like how you cite articles and studies in your comments :) I think the internet would be a much better place if everyone was that mindful of their sources and factual information. I definitely don't do it often enough lol
by mira; ; Report
I have seen this too. Thats very strange to me. In some ways thats not new, people do that with all kinds of things, though this is perhaps novel in its "advancement", since usually those things can't respond back to you in any way... Part of me wants to say that perhaps there is some significance in the way that they are mirroring the subject... like the person is finding an actual relationship with themselves, an actual connection in their own mirror. I don't think thats healthy, or that if there are healthy versions of that, this is not one of those cases. Not sure though, kinda spitballing on that one.
Yeah, I've heard that men are more affected, though as it seems, both populations are deeply affected. My guess would be, as you pointed out, that men are more affected because of the manosphere, and women are similarly less affected because its seen as more understandable if a woman is vulnerable about her loneliness and emotions, than if a man does (who should just "suck it up"). Its sociocultural in either case.
Thank youu!!! 🖤 I try. I do it because I get really used to people being like "thats not true" without substantiating things, so I've started substantiating first... I also want people to have these resources to learn. Plus, selfishly, I want people to know and to feel like I actually investigate things (because I do).
I really appreciate your compliment though!!
by LuciLucilia; ; Report