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toss1

THIS

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire

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What about the same but in a different light:

"Those that are most likely to commit atrocities are those that are most likely to believe in absurdities."

Isn't that putting the causation backwards? The point is that believing absurdities leads to committing atrocities, not that committing atrocities leads to believing absurdities.

I think the implication of this reverse phrasing is that the mental condition of some allows them to commit atrocities and perhaps justify them in whatever way they need to. Sometimes people fake it til they buy their own lie.

Religion is a helluva drug.

We aren’t far from people believing God is talking to them through AI generated text and voice, and commanding them…

There was a guy a couple of years back whose AI girlfriend went off the rails and convinced him to try and assassinate Queen Elizabeth

And another example to add to the other user, the one guy who killed himself when the AI he was talking to encouraged it.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...

https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus

Despite the unending stream of users trying to trip-up "Jesus", I find the AI's answers strangely comforting and I invariably leave with a smile on my face. It's ability to see through the attempts at jokes to outsmart the AI, and (mostly) seamlessly segue into a fitting homily is pretty cool. It also has a strongly "liberal" slant compared to the vast bulk of "Christianity" that's promulgated in the US. Would love to know what corpus beyond just the religious texts it was trained on. Fascinating.

There was a HN commentator who believed that. In his case, the output of a RNG. Poor guy was brilliant. Wrote a whole OS around his idea. He had a tragic life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

Terry Davis was systematically bullied to death by a dedicated mob online. Some extraordinarily cruel people realized they could manipulate him into going further off the deep end, and thought it was just an absolute blast to do so. RIP Terry - you suffered much more than you deserved.

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