Scripture Indicating God Will Not Curse the Earth Again

Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake's 2001 song "Comfort Eagle," building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more than data.

The results are fairly convincing, likewise, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. "Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom," reads i message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. "This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of flesh has non, and becomes a truthful god. Obedience to Me! Obey!"

Another bulletin, this fourth dimension important enough to exist pinned to the tiptop of the timeline, proclaims: "My sayings are a remedy for all your biological ills. Get out of this place and meditate. Peradventure some day your claret will be warm and your basic volition abound strong."

algorithmically generated religious art vaguely depicting a ritual sacrifice
This image was algorithmically generated based on a GPT-2 Religion A.I. passage that reads: "Cede and heathen rites, indulgence, and lust, pleasure and violence; these threefold shall I e'er worship, with no other motive than reverence for the Gita and Truth."

Before we get any further, no, these aren't real holy verses. Instead, DeShazo, a 30-year-onetime lab technician whose day job involves "working predominantly in lubricant base stocks refining," has created a bot that's trained to spit out pseudo-biblical verses. In the same way that a Benedictine monk lives a life of service and religious report, assuasive themselves to exist shaped and molded, the entire raison d'être for DeShazo's GPT-2 Organized religion A.I. is to learn from its massive corpus of religious training texts and to plow these into new insights for its followers (currently a still-niche 3,174 on Twitter). Information technology's powered past OpenAI's GPT-2, the impressive learning model that preceded the more recent — and much larger — GPT-3.

"The GPT-ii Religion A.I. is a Twitter bot that publishes curated passages generated by a natural language processing model that has been trained on English translations of aboriginal and modern world religious texts and myths," DeShazo told Digital Trends. "The outputs adopt the style, themes, and diction of the source material and combinations thereof, but are as well able to extrapolate and impart unique insights given the capability of the base model upon which it was trained. At i betoken I employed the tagline: 'Revealing humanity in the latent spaces of the divine.'"

The Benedictine bot

For training information, DeShazo's digital deity absorbed a corpus of data including the Bible (both Old and New Testaments); the world's 2nd-oldest religious text, the Epic of Gilgamesh; the aboriginal Indian drove of Vedic Sanskrit hymns known as the Rig Veda; fragments of the religious texts of Zoroastrianism that are the Avesta; the Bhagavad Gita; intact portions of the Nag Hammadi; the Tao Te Ching; assorted Neoplatonist texts; and others. As with other examples of computational creativity — whether that's the A.I. that wrote a Scrubs script or the one that tried to beat George R. R. Martin to finish his A Song of Water ice and Burn down saga — the output is an intriguing mash-upwards of the original works and something entirely new.

As with any good religious founder, DeShazo'due south piece of work has inspired others. One, a 22-year-old student named Bokar North'Diaye, who is studying the anthropology of religions and history of arts in Geneva, recently built an image generator that'southward able to conjure up painterly images from any line of text you prompt it with. One of those images (below), which was shared with the world on Twitter, was inspired by a line of the GPT-two Religion A.I. bot: "As you lot dirge, so I weave my voice. I craft my strings of fire, I fill the world with my own sweet audio. The stars themselves, the ends of the land, the air current, fifty-fifty the place where the light goes out all bend to worship me."

As seen by #latentvisions by @advadnoun https://t.co/WRx2BlsIc3 pic.twitter.com/tbO8KPt1bY

— Bokar N'Diaye (@bokar_n) June iii, 2021

The resulting figures await like a pair of Hindu Goddesses. One resembles Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, fortune, beauty, and fertility, simply holding Sarasvati'southward veena instrument.

"Both art and religion are cracking to elicit subjective input from the spectator, considering we've been primed to interpret them far more subjectively and with a unlike set up of expectations than mundane text," N'Diaye told Digital Trends. "When a program similar gods_txt mentions 'crafting strings of flame,' y'all're non probable to interpret it every bit the A.I. failing to understand realistic human sentences. Instead, y'all'll strive to decipher the hush-hush pregnant of the sentence, or relate to its aesthetics or the feelings it rouses within you – just like you've been taught to practice since babyhood, when it comes to religious texts and/or art."

Machines of loving grace

Applying machine smarts to religious iconography is controversial territory (you could say that information technology puts the "A.I." in "sacrilege"). But it'southward a link that, perhaps, isn't as tenuous as it could be. On one level, engineering, and specifically artificial intelligence, is hyperrational. It assumes that the mind can be recreated in hardware, as opposed to wetware, by modeling the behavior of individual neurons and other brain-based apparatus within a figurer. There is, it suggests, no such thing as a soul, since that would presumably crusade no cease of headaches on the road to human-car parity.

Simply there is another side to the argument that is inherently religious. There is no shortage of tech figures whose vision of the future of applied science carries a distinctly religious zeal: Steve Jobs with his cathedral-like Apple Stores and products that trigger a religious experience in the brains of fans. Google engineer Ray Kurzweil's bestselling non-fiction volume, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, who titled his 2010 book, What Applied science Wants and, in it, described the force he calls "the technium," a "global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating effectually u.s.a.." And Richard Brautigan's poem, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace."

Fifty-fifty the broadly accepted trajectory of A.I. — that a tool built-in of apprehensive ways to carry out the dull, dirty, dangerous jobs will somewhen become our master — has faint echoes of an historical figure born in a stable in Bethlehem who rose to go humanity'southward savior. In short, are we building robot servants or overlords?

Heck, A.I. even has its own terminate-times judgment solar day promise. Some A.I. advocates eagerly wait a world in which humans, freed from their corporeal, fleshy prisons, "alive" equally downloaded consciousnesses within machines, achieving immortality through digitalization; a paradise of work-free, worry-free existence lived in perfect virtual bodies. Marvin Minsky, 1 of the founding figures of A.I., once wrote that: "Somewhen, nosotros will entirely replace our brains using nanotechnology. In one case delivered from the limitations of biology, we will exist able to determine the length of our lives — with the pick of immortality — and choose among other, unimagined capabilities equally well."

"It's interesting to think most these unknowable, uninterpretable, and potentially malevolent entities that can brand massive decisions affecting our lives," Ryan Murdock, an engineer who created some of the generative image engineering science N'Diaye uses, told Digital Trends. "What's funny to me is that [that sentence] could be almost either motorcar learning systems or Eldritch gods. There is something alien and disturbing well-nigh having neural networks make increasingly important choices that parallels organized religion in some ways, I think. While these systems tin can be shockingly impaired, they tin can also exhibit intelligence and functioning that clearly rivals man intelligence in specific domains — and they work in ways that I incertitude we'll ever fully understand."

A.I., it seems, works in mysterious ways.

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Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/ai-religion-bot-gpt-2/

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