On the non-use of AI in my writing process
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> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
Agents can plan out a narrative draft, write it out section by section, maybe out of order, then tweak it, plant clues if it wants to, then trigger it in another chapter file etc. Then read the whole thing, reconsider, etc. It can iterate. I'm not saying it will be great literature, but the problem isn't the inability to create long range references.
My bigger point would be this: arguing from such mistaken technical ideas, when not having any idea about the tools is a sign that people's real problem is none of those technical limitations, but Western culture has lost the vocabulary to express their true sentiment. They are grasping for words but can't reach for "soul" and other religious terms because that would sound ridiculous in a secular modern world. But they clearly want to express that and we'd be ahead if we could discuss in such actual terms. Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. Because there is something mysterious and important about the human spirit. (the same vocabulary-inaccessibility is plaguing other culture war issues too). People will rather talk about fake water consumption problems than touch the topic of the human soul or spirit.
Just be upfront. 1) It threatens your livelihood that people can get the thing done faster and cheaper than what they used to pay you, 2) our relationship to an AI shaped entity is spiritually risky and a esthetically off putting, and we have to talk about golems and the tower of babel and stuff. If you think I'm being incoherent, you're in for a ride. Society will have to come to terms with major major issues, not just job replacement and bad slop art.
That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%.
It is less than I expected.
Maybe if AI does work out better than expected for knowledge work or becomes applicable to robotics and fields like construction, we are going to see a larger buildout.
Weird how all these concerns can simply go away if they just simply shared the information the public wants (water usage, sound generation, power usage) rather than refuse to do so.
> It is less than I expected.
I suspect this is because of the word "global". Are not most of these currently planned specifically for the USA? Sure, the USA has a disproportionate use of electricity, but IIRC it's like 16% (1/6th) of global?
3% of global electricity is roughly the same as 18% of US electricity; a bit less because not all the new DCs will be in the US, but that's something that I consider with regards to the economics and why I'm bearish on this topic, as I think it will be a case of Dutch disease in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended.
If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and limitations of our preexisting biology, exercising more control of their own lives - that’d be wonderful.
I obviously have no idea wherever language models can lead to such dream, of would be a dead end.
Right now, necessarily so.
The more mysteries that science solves, the more we unweave the rainbow*, the worse the tension between rationality and our sense of what we are. Am I the atoms, or the pattern betwixt? Am I the present moment alone, my memories mere shadows of past patterns and my current form doomed to be a shadow to a future pattern of these self-same atoms?
Sometimes even the question is unbearable.
Does the gap scare you somehow? Why?
Any artificial biology (and whatever hosts a live human spirit automatically becomes a life form - thus, a biology) is entirely our, human product. If it's not ours, whose else it is?
> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off.
I agree that our biology is 100% innate part of us, as we are today - we are layers upon layers upon layers. But some parts of some of those layers are inadequate for who we're trying to be as a society. And many of those had appeared way before a human pronounced first words ever.
We'll never be at peace with what some parts of us are doing. We'll continue to cheer for punishments, and demand those relative to our feelings about the act rather than consequences. Our moral judgements will keep piggybacking on our pathogen-avoidance machinery, ever prone to abuse by those who seek wars. We won't collectively overcome our unconscious contempt for low-status. We'll be bound to self-deceivingly conform to beliefs for loyalty signaling. We'll keep tending to pursue short-term gains even if they clearly contradict our future goals. And so on. YMMV, but I hold no allegiance to any of those machinery. It's very interesting how it all came to be, but there's nothing beautiful about the results.
If we can "fix" it in our current biology - that'd be wonderful too, although I suspect that it could be impossible without creating a whole new family, separate from apes. Possibly a lot deeper. At which point it's probably "traitorous" all the same, unless you hold some allegiance to DNA-based life in general.
I guess, we can try slapping on new circuitry that overrides old one. But why pile up hacks? We have plenty piled up already, and most don't benefit us. Not to mention difficulties of mixed-biology reproduction.
So, a new organism doesn't strike me as treason, as long as it replicates all the good parts of what makes us human. The darker rest can carry on in (trans)our cultural layers, as historical tales of how we were in the days of old, no longer an active factor in daily lives.
> Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits?
You're asking who's directing a hypothetical? Hypothetically, no one. Or, better said - evolution, as always. It developed a few interesting mechanisms: tool use, language, reasoning, now through those it starts to dabble at different biologies.
And the Life itself benefits. As it always did, from diversity.
You've written a lot of words to say "humans are flawed, let's create a machine that's better", but trying to dress it up in flowery, lofty language. I'm not impressed by that. You have the programmer's disease of over-abstraction and over-active pattern recognition. You try to blur the line between essentially human, biological medicine, and technological development. They are not the same thing; they have completely different philosophies and aims.
I'll answer my rhetorical question: at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are directing a lot of this. I do not want this. Enclaves of profit-seeking technologists are more-or-less the last people I want doing... well, anything, actually, but certainly not something that gets people like you in a religious fervour.
Every example was picked and vetted from popsci books I’ve read, with real basis in neuroscience (in my layman understanding, obviously, so I could’ve gotten something wrong, but I trust that a bit more than an online diagnosis). That blending was a pretty naive mix of a bunch of sci-fi tropes, but point taken - proper writers indeed blur those lines a lot better than my mess of a post.
Ironic to implicitly accuse Stross of this; as I recall, he's one of the voices describing The Singularity as Christian Eschatology/Book of Revelation/the rapture for atheist nerds.
> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not.
One of his own paragraphs explains his non-financial perspective and reason:
I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively—before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist—so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?
Without criticism, he is also clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him (he says specifically he is "one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating ebooks to train their LLMs" and "train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole"). Writing is not a high-earning job (with the exception of a few superstars who may as well be lottery winners), and he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited.
> People will rather talk about fake water consumption problems than touch the topic of the human soul or spirit.
For a living, he writes about Cthulhu and their ilk doing mind control; I want to say I don't think this would put him off, but if it did he'd hardly be the only professional author who can write a fictional story about something without being able to apply such ideas to rhetoric. (He'll hate being compared to Rowling here, but consider how Rowling hates trans people while her fiction has a variety of shape-shifting spells).
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> clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him
So readers will read AI generated books because they are better than his writing? People can't invest ten bucks or however much into reading a good book? How about piracy? It exists. I bet I could download all his books in less than 5 minutes. If someone insists on not paying for that book, they can easily get it.
> he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited
This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s, or, well before the printing press. Copyright is a narrow exception to the general rule that people are free to listen to others and use the ideas and spread the ideas. There are exceptions like trade secrets and various dangerous information about nuclear topics and whatnot, but generally preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical. If anything, copyright should be reduced to something like the creation of the work + 20 years. Not lifetime +X. That's plenty enough to be the sole distributor and to block others from building on top of it. After that it's time to let people use culture as it's always been. Changing, mixing, remixing, retelling, combining, etc.
The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.
Nobody needs a better argument than that to explain the title "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"
> You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently.
You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon.
> No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons.
I can say this about 100% of things banned by laws. The laws are what changes us away from the default.
> This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s
Everything pre ~1800s was awful, so this is not a useful argument for or against anything.
> preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical
Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? This is not a widely held position, even amongst people very impressed with what they can do. The justification given for why AI should be able to read all the things and write new outputs from them is that nobody objected when the same models working the same way were worse at it and could only produce e.g. (c. 2020) Google Translate. If they were reliant on some model being allowed to act like a human, they would be (and indeed frequently are anyway) facing questions about how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules.
(Separately: For humans I kinda agree with what I just quoted from you, however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent).
> The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.
IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.
You can start a shitty newspaper by looking at all the stories in some other newspaper, then writing about the same facts while imitating a similar register and style.
> Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce?
The AI is not an independent entity as of today. The tyranny is against humans who want to use computation to process information they have gathered by listening to public discourse, public art releases and so on.
> how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules.
Again, AI is not an independent agent today, so the person who is using an AI program in a way that is illegal is the one that gets punished.
> however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent
It's a matter of discussion whether such voluntary agreements should be allowed where someone agrees to refraining from such actions. We don't allow contracts about selling your organs, but this may not go as far.
> IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.
No there is no similarity at all. "Consume content" is novel marketing language, because to them it's easier to think of everyone as "consumer" because sometimes they sell hamburgers or ice cream to them, sometimes they sell subscriptions to cable TV, sometimes subscriptions to SaaS, and they don't care too much what they sell. So from their POV it's all the same. Since the consumer is paying for access to something, they must be consuming that thing. When they watch TV, it's like eating the burger, from the point of view of someone optimizing sales. But this is pushing the entirety of humanity to see everything from such a narrow lens as advertisement. The same is with the word "content". There used to be musicians and authors, now you have "content creators". "Content" is a marketing word. It means all the stuff that's not an ad. In marketing, you interface with your "consumers" primariy by making them watch ads. But to watch the ad, they need some lure, and the catchall term to all that icky stuff a marketing person has to handle or touch, even briefly, that's not a warm and fuzz little ad, is "content". It's like "payload" in the shipping industry. Imagine if tomorrow we called everything phyiscal simply "payload". You are not a carpenter, you're a payload creator. You're not a car wash company, you're a payload cleaning company. etc.
> immaterial aspect or essence of a living being. It is typically believed to be immortal and to exist apart from the material world
that's all still mostly on apart from 'exist apart from the material world' which doesn't seem to fit with observation. But the memories and concepts of people live on.
Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
And also these models have been associating with real-world phenomena from the first moment their training data did, and also those text vectors are (to varying degrees) associated with corresponding image vectors in multimodal models.
Of course, the Plato's cave critique would still be valid.
>Subjective Experience: Involves raw sensory awareness rather than complex abstract thought
On that current AI is a bit lacking as they don't have very good sensors whereas human brains are pretty wired up for touch, smell, sight, sound and the like. AIs do get linked to cameras though and could improve a lot in those directions.
For sight and sound, the sensory input layer for AIs is much, much richer in terms of bitrate, though is redundant.
> AIs do get linked to cameras though and could improve a lot in those directions.
Video is an interesting one, as most AI systems use the full pixel information of a scene, while human vision is much more temporal, focusing primarily on logistic deltas rather than raw pixels. That's not inherent to hardware (e.g. see event or "neuromorphic" cameras), but it's a significant difference. My more sympathetic reading of embodiment is that the relative paucity of the human sensory stream is part of what makes us work better than current AI in many domains, in that it forces us to form richer, temporal world models from a low bitrate stream of salient events instead of relying on shallow responses to rich sensory data.
But this post seems to mostly channel Harlan Ellison. And while he was amazing in his prime, with some absolutely legendary rants, he didn't age well in the end.
I do like his challenge to make LLMs useful to himself and to other authors though. Someone needs to make that happen and nearly exactly how he described it.
I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.
(Or is this just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect striking again?)
That seems like an advance on the toolchain described here:
https://www.thewritersforhire.com/11-great-organization-tool...
I wouldn't be too upset about that. They write better anyway.
Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
If you want to build your own, you can feed this DESIGN.md to your favorite clankie: https://pastebin.com/huRkGnba
That's not irony, or even cute. He's literally describing a tool he'd like to use to plan edits to his writing.
Consider his book Accelerando (which I'll take the opportunity to plug again, especially as he's made available for free here: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...) Not only did I find it quite engaging and thought-provoking, it is also proving rather prescient, and even helpful in decoding some of the things that are happening today.
For instance, in the very first chapter the protagonist spawns agents to go research something in the background and report back to him. And then a year ago, I randomly became curious about a rather involved topic (how fast could we feasibly replace all human labor with robotics), but I did not want to spend time researching so I outsourced it to Google Deep Research which churned away for almost half an hour and came back with a 30 page report with 49 citations via "actual internet searches for verifiable sources." (If you're curious about the conclusion: not for a very long time partly due to critical supply chain constraints.)
After I went through the report, it suddenly struck me: my agent may have executed in a GPU cloud instead of a cybernetic brain, but holy crap I had literally just lived a SciFi scene! A scene that I did not expect to experience in my lifetime!
Which is why I found TFA a bit unexpected. TFA says a few things that I would disagree with. Like, no, AI is not a "stochastic parrot" and I'd assume he'd be primed to realize it. And AI is not competing with authors -- other authors with AI are, and using AI trained on real text to aid writing has been a thing since the days of red squiggly lines in word processors, which TFA even acknowledges.
If you see his last few comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross) it's clear he's pretty negative on the tech industry and Capitalism, which I tend to agree with. I can see how that could color his thinking.
That may also mean he's avoided LLMs to the extent that he is not aware what the frontier models have become. I would encourage him to put aside his distate and re-engage with them deeply; maybe he'd be at least a little bit excited to see some of his writing turn out to be prophetic in some good ways besides the bad.
If you haven’t read The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter it’s worth a read. It’s not a conspiratorial or even outright pessimistic theory.
You wrote "the west", what system will (in theory) work out? And how much does it value the individual?
I know capitalism for example, can in theory, never succeed as its base premise is built on endless growth (which simply wont work out with finite resources). It's a short term system that we need to improve on. All the other systems we had, like feudalism, I'd rather die than live in... Personally I'd highly prefer socialism, but that also wont work out as too many humans highly reject its concept and its also not safe from corruption.
I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other systems, but I don’t think Tainter’s conception of a collapse would be limited to the west.
Interestingly since you edited your comment to talk about capitalism, I think under the lense of Tainter’s theory it’s the most resilient to collapse since it’s simpler, at least in theory. In practice it’s heavily regulated - in fact I’d say no country really is capitalist, at most you could say it’s “state capitalism” which is very different from free market capitalism. But you’re also not wrong in that it has issues of its own.
This premise sounds very intriguing. And yea I named capitalism just because I don't think we can go on like we do currently, and I'd agree that in theory it's not complex at all. In fact it makes a lot of sense (in the short term, and as long as people are willing to get exploited to be able to finance life).
Nonetheless maybe heavily regulated capitalism works, allthough, regulators are prone to corruption and act way too slow. And lobbyists preventing measurements to combat climate change as an example, I currently see as direct threat to my personal wellbeing. Hard to believe in a system that relies on exploitation, the big "if you work hard you can make it" lie and actively threatening ones or ones children's wellbeing by being ignorant to obvious and well researched topics for short term monetary enrichment...
Today we have a very complex system of private equity, leveraged buyout, and asset management, with the incentive of expansion over production. Mass financialization required the US to outsource manufacturing to cheap labour countries like China, operating two parallel economies - tangible and intangible assets. In the last 20 or so years, half the companies in the US stock market have disappeared, US farmland has shrunk by a fifth and manufacturing jobs have become redundant. The value of assets has exploded, and an ever shrinking group of transnational corporatists have turned the US economy into gambling bazaar, but the house is losing too. Stock market returns are single-handedly driven by AI speculation and the fastest growing businesses are disconnected from real goods. We have an extremely complex economy which looks entirely fake and disconnected from the real world - at least, to a layman, an economist will justify it all. Except the layman is correct. You have to keep in mind that inflating assets benefits the 1% at the detriment of everyone else, and they benefit on both sides of it. Plus politicians can use their free money to buy votes.
So I wouldn't even call modern economies "capitalist", they are their own thing now. We have to wait for the historians to build new frameworks to accurately describe them.
I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
AI is so good that if you see an hallucination as obviously wrong like this one it’s a sign it’s written by a human.
In general probably not much of a stretch to get rid of convolutions or recurrence by replacing with attention and see if it works hence the title of the original transformers paper.
Or "it's not 4-wheel-drive, it's diesel!", if familiar with cars.
Once Musk said he believes in Transformers instead of diffusion (or the other way around). When actually diffusion transformers are very popular and mainstream. What he meant was autoregressive inference vs diffusion. People like to use buzzwords while not knowing them. Old issue, it was the same decades ago.
To make it even more confusing, there are also diffusion LLMs, which typically but not necessary, use transformers also.
And independently of diffusion and transformer and llm or image generator, you can optionally put a GAN discriminator adversarial loss on any of them.
It's not like every model has the same amount of those shortcomings.
The first sentence seems to imply the average state. No?
The problem really is I haven't used these other AIs for finding links to things I am an expert in, so I cannot really say how likely they are to get things completely wrong, or at least have one wrong or misinterpreted fact per response.
But he’s made the error of trying to come at it from a technical perspective, when he clearly knows nothing about that side of things, which discredits the rest.
Huh? That quote appears to be the entirety of the "technical perspective" of the post and is an aside from his larger points that you have blessed as "fine". Literally nothing in the rest of the post relies on that incorrect statement.
Let me quibble with what is discredited here, given the entirety of your point is built upon an error.
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
This is wrong too. RLVR grounds foundational models in reality.
> no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
Historically, that LLMs were text-only used to be a major argument for why they "lack access to meaning", see the Stochastic Parrot paper and the Octopus paper that it references. But even the authors of those papers have (grudgingly) conceded that the argument no longer holds due to multimodality.
I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.
I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...
Starts of with a quite defensible:
First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.
If human-like capabilities required human-like consciousness, early models (like GPT-4) passing all those exams would suggest those models being "as conscious as" a university student. (My inner Douglas Adams wants to invert this, but the best I can do is "The Xarloxians did not consider university students to be conscious beings; their reasoning being…", which you may recognise as a riff on Babel fish and the non-existence of God).
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
I think my favorite moment in the book is when one of the characters (at the time, a digitized consciousness traveling at near light speed in a space ship the size of a coke can to explore an anomalous signal sent by alien life) argues that the singularity is a ridiculous concept and will never happen. I always thought that was a really clever observation on the part of Stross that our perspectives are so narrow and provincial, we often can’t see what’s happening in front of our own faces. Your comment does kind of recontextualize that for me and I sort of wonder if that was the author speaking directly to the audience?
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."
I think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm basing that on the Wikipedia plot summary. I have no interest in darkening my day by actually reading any work that can be rightly described as "dystopian".
You might not like the society they've built, but there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian.
(It's very debatable, of course, but it's not instantly dismissable)
Sure, like a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics...and an AI life companion in their ear. What I can't understand is why they're still on a forum with humans when they can go have that today.
I think there are a lot of paths where we just rock ourselves back to a regressed agency societal state, and just never have the capacity to have any affect on the wider universe. Which is maybe good for the universe, as we are certainly not a role-model for certain forms of balance. But maybe the balanced view doesn't seek to dominate and influence and become ubiquitous, after all
You’ve lost the plot. There is no singularity, your machine-god is not coming to save you.
Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.
For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.
So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."
You can find a lot of neo-religious behavior within the AI accelerationist community. Cults coming out of rationalism and fear of the wrath of an angry AI God, making the world right for AI's coming (and even killing the nonbelievers.) Evangelism. Promises of infinite plenty in a post-scarcity heaven. Even a persecution complex - "Luddites" are increasingly demonized, hated, accused of moral depravity for their doubt, and for not abandoning the world, taking up their prompt and following the AI.
How many people post about how AI seems to be draining them of meaning and purpose, that it doesn't live up to the hype, that keeping up with the rituals is exhausting, but feeling that the problem must be with them and not AI? That's a religious person having doubts about the nature of their faith, unable to accept that the God they believe in might not be real, and framing their issues as their own moral failing.
And all of this before the "Singularity" even shows up, and people upload their minds - I mean, meet God in the air.
It's religion, very specifically neo-Christian ideologically. Regardless of any arguments one might make about the practical benefits of using AI in any particular field, it is obviously also religion.