> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 [SIC] years old.
Where do you stop once you go down this rabbit hole? Which faith(s) get their views injected in? Christian? Muslim? Hindu? Pagan Gods? Should I get the perspective of the follower's of Thor when I ask a question?
Note that you can always ask for the religious perspective you're interested in. IME with the religion(s) I grew up in or know a great deal about, the LLMs are pretty good at answering accurately and respectfully. Nearly all the products already offer you tools to personalize the output for you too if you want to inject your faith into the answers, so it's not like the LLMs won't give you a religious perspective if you want it.
> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.
> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.
Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.
Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.
For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.
> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist
This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.
The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Is certainly a typo, off by an order of magnitude. 600 years ago the Christian Church had already been around for more than 1000 years. Young earth creationists believe the earth is ~6000 years old
Basically all op-ed level pieces on AI make me feel like dialectic materialism really needs to make a come back. Public discourse has given up on engaging with the physical constraints of the world in a meaningful way.
> [...] LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
It's not doctrinal but not opposed either, as it is irrelevant to Salvation. Whether the universe was created that way or not doesn't change the fact that God, if the BBT did in fact happen, was it's architect. The Church maintains that this is a possibility.
This used to be free, now I guess it has a sub, but you might be able to ask it a few questions before you reach limit.
https://www.mastercatechism.com/
But yeah, the catechism is the single source of truth on that stuff. Baltimore, Trent. Those two are the best. The doctrine doesn't change amongst catechisms only the writing style. I like those two the best.
> Magnifica Humanitas is that rarest of treats, a 40,000-odd word AI policy document written in Latin.
I stopped reading at this sentence. If you go to the source (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...), you can see it's available in eight languages, none of them being Latin. In fact, I read elsewhere a few days ago that one of the novelties of this one is that, unlike all the preceding ones, it's not written in Latin; the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas) also says that ("The encyclical was the first to be published without an official Latin version. This followed a recent change to Vatican regulations permitting such documents to be drafted in other languages.[4]").
If the article gets it this wrong already in the third paragraph, it's not worth reading any further.
> There’s also the first stirrings of fun from the lawyers, some of whom are reportedly wondering whether Papa’s downer on AI is enough to give Catholics the right to refuse it in the workplace on religious exemption grounds.
I mean, sure. Some communities, like the Amish are pretty famous for that attitude. It is a respectable option, but the practical upshot is it just means there are a bunch of jobs you can't do. There is a bonus that you get to be part of a pacifistic community because your military branch isn't going to be in a position to defeat anyone.
>LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality
Everything that does not contain the universe itself has to do that.
Have you ever seen a cat and then realised it was just a plastic bag. That;s you synchronising your internal model to updated observations.
There's a cheap shot at Anthropic suggesting that AI might be more than the sum of its parts.
There are patterns to science and patterns to religion. To delare something is or is not is the domain of religion. Science always gives you something that is incomplete, it's the best we know right now, it corresponds to theories and tests.
It is a very scientific thing to say you could possibly have a conscious AI. Because the possibility exists through not being convincingly ruled out. It is possible that matter can produce consciousness because we are made of matter and if we call the thing we have consciousness then that suggests things made of matter can be conscious.
It is also scientific to analyse models to see what they represent and to present the possibility that their representations might correspond to an experience.
None of that is says that is definitely the case.
Once you get to saying 'It's obvious that A LLM could never produce consciousness' or 'they are not really thinking' or 'they don't understand anything' you are talking in the absolutes that only religion can offer.
Science will frequently state 'There is no evidence of ...'. It is frequently entirely reasonable to act on the presumption that something doesn't exist in that situation, but that is not the same thing as refusing to accept that it could. If evidence turns up science will change its view, if it does not, then it fails to be science.
You see poor science exhibited in off-hand dismissals of perpetual motion machines. If someone presents a claim that they have made a perpetual motion machines, you don't respond, as many do, by saying it is against the laws of thermodynamics and therefore the machine doesn't work. That is applying a faith in the discoveries that are more than they say, you are treating science like a religion by doing that. A scientific response to a perpetual motion machine is to say "I expect you are wrong in some way, because well tested rules suggest this cannot happen" you may then ask about various implications working from the assumption that the machine does work. If they cannot show any of those implications actually happening it suggests that the machine doesn't not work (basically you can ask "where does the energy come from'). If they can show solid proof of the implications, good science would then accept this as a counterexample to the laws of thermodynamics. That has yet to happen, the laws seem fIrly robust. But a perpetual motion machine does not fail to work because of the laws of thermodynamics, it fails to work because of the way the universe works. The laws of thermodynamics are just a very good model of how it works. If the perpetual motion machine worked. It would be the laws, not the universe itself that was incorrect.
Science allows for possibility, and searches for evidence.
Religion just states what some want to believe is true.
In the same way, outright declarations of the capabilities of AI now and in the future are the
Domain of religion.
The scientific view is, as always, "here's what we have evidence for, so we don't think this particular AI is conscious because it doesn't show what we would expect for that." There is no absolute here. If something unexplainable with the current system comes to light then science must adapt, that is what makes it science.
> The danger here is that this is not only an extension of the ‘Teach the controversy’ tactic that fundamentalists use to try and get one very particular kind of religion equal status to science and humanism in schools,
...
> but that this is highly integrated with powerful political and financial forces.
- Doomsayers with Yudkowsky et. al. at the helm calling to bomb datacenters
- “Roko’s Basilisk”
- General AI psychosis and treatment of AI as something with consciousness. Any attempts of rebuttal are met with lazy “but how do you know you are conscious. haha got ‘em”
- Inquisitorial purges of non-believers: “our CEO mandates you shall use AI in your work, or else”
- Communion with a God: “I was talking to ChatGPT and I realised <something personally profound>”
- “You are just using it wrong” aka “You are not praying hard enough”
- Cult Executive Officers
- Promise of incoming salvation with AGI taking over and making a Heaven (or Hell - caveat emptor) on Earth
There are a lot of people who are developing an unhealthy obsession with AI, both in their work and personal lives. It may not be a religion (yet?), but they are treating chat bots as nearly infallible, all knowing friends. The term "AI psychosis" is overused, but there is some sort of a mental illness going around. I'm not talking about teenagers, either. These are working adults in their 40's and 50's.
Everything is a religion to at least a small group of people. LLMs are no exception. It is currently not broadly adopted religiously, but it does have qualities that could see it become a much bigger religion over time.
A classic interview question used to be "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
> What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
The tech industry is made up of a lot of different people with different opinions/perspectives, so differing views is exactly what I would expect. And to be fair the views are pretty widely available for anyone curious. Tech industry leaders haven't exactly been quiet about what they think AI will do to/for humanity.
You may not want AI used as a proselytizing pipeline into home and office. Others do.
In many ways, AI is a religion. Not because it requires belief in a utopian future through a dystopian present, or that it’s used by very powerful people to get more power, or that nobody can define what it actually is. All these things are overlaps on the Venn diagram, but the biggie is that LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
-----
is not actually a coherent train of thought, although you can see why it might seem to be to a language model.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 [SIC] years old.
Where do you stop once you go down this rabbit hole? Which faith(s) get their views injected in? Christian? Muslim? Hindu? Pagan Gods? Should I get the perspective of the follower's of Thor when I ask a question?
Note that you can always ask for the religious perspective you're interested in. IME with the religion(s) I grew up in or know a great deal about, the LLMs are pretty good at answering accurately and respectfully. Nearly all the products already offer you tools to personalize the output for you too if you want to inject your faith into the answers, so it's not like the LLMs won't give you a religious perspective if you want it.
> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.
> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher
Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.
Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.
For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.
> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist
This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.
-4004 earth not found?
You ignored the "[SIC]" notation in order to pretend you are correcting the person you responded to.
You're "Well, ackshually..."ing, without even adding a correction. Yay.
So many different races and religions that it's best to stick to good old secularism.
The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.
> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old
Is certainly a typo, off by an order of magnitude. 600 years ago the Christian Church had already been around for more than 1000 years. Young earth creationists believe the earth is ~6000 years old
Thanks for clarifying. I know they're nuts but the earth being 600 years when Jesus was around 2000 years ago didn't make any sense.
>> didn't make any sense.
only because of your lack of FAITH </s>
Basically all op-ed level pieces on AI make me feel like dialectic materialism really needs to make a come back. Public discourse has given up on engaging with the physical constraints of the world in a meaningful way.
I think this is the core argument:
> [...] LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
Surprised if the Pope really cares about some Fair & Balanced coverage of Young Earth creationism. Isn’t the Big Bang official Catholic doctrine?
It's not doctrinal but not opposed either, as it is irrelevant to Salvation. Whether the universe was created that way or not doesn't change the fact that God, if the BBT did in fact happen, was it's architect. The Church maintains that this is a possibility.
This used to be free, now I guess it has a sub, but you might be able to ask it a few questions before you reach limit. https://www.mastercatechism.com/
This is also a wealth of information on what's dogmatic and what isn't. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
But yeah, the catechism is the single source of truth on that stuff. Baltimore, Trent. Those two are the best. The doctrine doesn't change amongst catechisms only the writing style. I like those two the best.
Young Earth Creationism is a purely Protestant belief. Although I'm aware of only one Hindu-ish faith that believes in YEC - the Brahma Kumaris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma_Kumaris
Disclaimer: my first girlfriend got us both involved in that faith.
The article is poorly written. "The report" there refers to the linked study in the previous paragraph, not the Pope's encyclical.
When I first heard of "prompt engineering", my first thought was for the Pythia and Roman augurs.
> Magnifica Humanitas is that rarest of treats, a 40,000-odd word AI policy document written in Latin.
I stopped reading at this sentence. If you go to the source (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...), you can see it's available in eight languages, none of them being Latin. In fact, I read elsewhere a few days ago that one of the novelties of this one is that, unlike all the preceding ones, it's not written in Latin; the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas) also says that ("The encyclical was the first to be published without an official Latin version. This followed a recent change to Vatican regulations permitting such documents to be drafted in other languages.[4]").
If the article gets it this wrong already in the third paragraph, it's not worth reading any further.
Am I dreaming, or are companies trying to start an AI cult just to squeeze even more money out of me?
If there are enough people who want a Christian LLM, why hasn't one been made one?
> There’s also the first stirrings of fun from the lawyers, some of whom are reportedly wondering whether Papa’s downer on AI is enough to give Catholics the right to refuse it in the workplace on religious exemption grounds.
I mean, sure. Some communities, like the Amish are pretty famous for that attitude. It is a respectable option, but the practical upshot is it just means there are a bunch of jobs you can't do. There is a bonus that you get to be part of a pacifistic community because your military branch isn't going to be in a position to defeat anyone.
It's a stupid premise given the pope didn't say anything even close to "Catholics should avoid AI".
>LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality
Everything that does not contain the universe itself has to do that.
Have you ever seen a cat and then realised it was just a plastic bag. That;s you synchronising your internal model to updated observations.
There's a cheap shot at Anthropic suggesting that AI might be more than the sum of its parts.
There are patterns to science and patterns to religion. To delare something is or is not is the domain of religion. Science always gives you something that is incomplete, it's the best we know right now, it corresponds to theories and tests.
It is a very scientific thing to say you could possibly have a conscious AI. Because the possibility exists through not being convincingly ruled out. It is possible that matter can produce consciousness because we are made of matter and if we call the thing we have consciousness then that suggests things made of matter can be conscious.
It is also scientific to analyse models to see what they represent and to present the possibility that their representations might correspond to an experience.
None of that is says that is definitely the case.
Once you get to saying 'It's obvious that A LLM could never produce consciousness' or 'they are not really thinking' or 'they don't understand anything' you are talking in the absolutes that only religion can offer.
Science will frequently state 'There is no evidence of ...'. It is frequently entirely reasonable to act on the presumption that something doesn't exist in that situation, but that is not the same thing as refusing to accept that it could. If evidence turns up science will change its view, if it does not, then it fails to be science.
You see poor science exhibited in off-hand dismissals of perpetual motion machines. If someone presents a claim that they have made a perpetual motion machines, you don't respond, as many do, by saying it is against the laws of thermodynamics and therefore the machine doesn't work. That is applying a faith in the discoveries that are more than they say, you are treating science like a religion by doing that. A scientific response to a perpetual motion machine is to say "I expect you are wrong in some way, because well tested rules suggest this cannot happen" you may then ask about various implications working from the assumption that the machine does work. If they cannot show any of those implications actually happening it suggests that the machine doesn't not work (basically you can ask "where does the energy come from'). If they can show solid proof of the implications, good science would then accept this as a counterexample to the laws of thermodynamics. That has yet to happen, the laws seem fIrly robust. But a perpetual motion machine does not fail to work because of the laws of thermodynamics, it fails to work because of the way the universe works. The laws of thermodynamics are just a very good model of how it works. If the perpetual motion machine worked. It would be the laws, not the universe itself that was incorrect.
Science allows for possibility, and searches for evidence.
Religion just states what some want to believe is true.
In the same way, outright declarations of the capabilities of AI now and in the future are the Domain of religion.
The scientific view is, as always, "here's what we have evidence for, so we don't think this particular AI is conscious because it doesn't show what we would expect for that." There is no absolute here. If something unexplainable with the current system comes to light then science must adapt, that is what makes it science.
> The danger here is that this is not only an extension of the ‘Teach the controversy’ tactic that fundamentalists use to try and get one very particular kind of religion equal status to science and humanism in schools, ... > but that this is highly integrated with powerful political and financial forces.
So, exactly like fundamentalist religion.
AI is more of a religious cult.
Let’s rewind:
- Doomsayers with Yudkowsky et. al. at the helm calling to bomb datacenters
- “Roko’s Basilisk”
- General AI psychosis and treatment of AI as something with consciousness. Any attempts of rebuttal are met with lazy “but how do you know you are conscious. haha got ‘em”
- Inquisitorial purges of non-believers: “our CEO mandates you shall use AI in your work, or else”
- Communion with a God: “I was talking to ChatGPT and I realised <something personally profound>”
- “You are just using it wrong” aka “You are not praying hard enough”
- Cult Executive Officers
- Promise of incoming salvation with AGI taking over and making a Heaven (or Hell - caveat emptor) on Earth
Jesus L.L.M. Christ. No, they are not a religion and never should be. Please stop associating AI with anything that resembles worship.
There are a lot of people who are developing an unhealthy obsession with AI, both in their work and personal lives. It may not be a religion (yet?), but they are treating chat bots as nearly infallible, all knowing friends. The term "AI psychosis" is overused, but there is some sort of a mental illness going around. I'm not talking about teenagers, either. These are working adults in their 40's and 50's.
Everything is a religion to at least a small group of people. LLMs are no exception. It is currently not broadly adopted religiously, but it does have qualities that could see it become a much bigger religion over time.
The linked article is also interesting: https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/27/anthropic-co-fo...
A classic interview question used to be "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
Dario Amodei did try to answer that question:
- https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
- https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...
It's pretty long and meandering but it's the closest I've seen from AI leadership engaging intellectually with the question you're asking
> What I'd like from the tech industry (and maybe also from the US government) would be an answer to "where do you see humanity in 5 years?" - because right now, I see lots of hype and panic, but little explanation what kind of vision should be realized with AI. Well, except overtly dystopian visions that could come right out of Marx' writings or a William Gibson novel. But even those aren't really self-consistent.
The tech industry is made up of a lot of different people with different opinions/perspectives, so differing views is exactly what I would expect. And to be fair the views are pretty widely available for anyone curious. Tech industry leaders haven't exactly been quiet about what they think AI will do to/for humanity.
I don't think this is a real article. This:
-----
You may not want AI used as a proselytizing pipeline into home and office. Others do.
In many ways, AI is a religion. Not because it requires belief in a utopian future through a dystopian present, or that it’s used by very powerful people to get more power, or that nobody can define what it actually is. All these things are overlaps on the Venn diagram, but the biggie is that LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.
-----
is not actually a coherent train of thought, although you can see why it might seem to be to a language model.
Bullshit in bullshit out.
Very weak article even for The Register.