The AI Ouija Board

Is Artificial Intelligence only seeming to be human -- or channeling intelligent spirits?

I see that Hasbro, the game company, has released an AI version of the Ouija board:

This is insane. Ouija boards work. They really do establish contact with malign spirits. I don’t know how they work, but they do. I’ve seen it myself, and besides, if you talk to exorcists, they will tell you that to use the Ouija board is to open up a vector for demons into your life. I’ve mentioned here before about how in my high school, a group of boys used to take the Ouija board to a graveyard to communicate with an entity that claimed to be the spirit of a man buried there. One night after curfew in our dorm, they continued to play with the board to speak to the spirit. At one point, the high school junior who had his hands on the planchette began to thrash around uncontrollably, as if possessed … and the board began to fly around the room. I wasn’t there for it, but I was in a Christian friend’s dorm room when the boys who lived across the hall, who had been in the room, ran into my friend’s room crying and begging him to pray for them. A few years later, the kid who had been possessed that night blew his own head off with a shotgun.

Don’t mess with Ouija boards.

I don’t know what the point of using an AI Ouija board would be. What’s seemingly cool about Ouija boards is that the information comes to you inexplicably. If you’re the kind of person who thinks the spirit’s words are really the result of someone pushing the planchette around, then you probably haven’t ever used a Ouija board, or seen it happen. I messed with one when I was 13, over at a friend’s house during a sleepover. I had my hands on the planchette when we asked it for the age of my friend’s mom, who had always refused to tell her kids. The planchette moved over the 5 and then the 1. He ran out and said, “Mom, the Ouija board says you are 51.” She screamed and told us to get that thing out of her house. It was right. The thing is, we would not have guessed 51, because she looked about 40, and besides, I had my hand on the planchette, and can tell you that it moved of its own accord.

Anyway, questions you ask an AI Ouija board could in principle be answered by AI. What’s the fun in that?

The reason I post this, though, is because of a book that’s coming out next week: Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences, by D.W. Pasulka. Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor who has made her reputation by investigating UFO culture as an emerging religion. I read Encounters a few weeks back, and it’s a banger of a book. It, and Pasulka’s previous book, American Cosmic, are largely responsible for me adding a chapter about the false enchantment of the technology world, of which UFO culture and messianic approaches to AI are a part. If you have not paid attention to this stuff as a spiritual and religious phenomenon, you are missing something important happening right under our noses.

In one of the book’s later chapters, Pasulka profiles a woman she calls “Simone,” a top investor in Artificial Intelligence and other tech fields. One thing that might startle you (it did me) in coming to the UFO and related fields is that most of those involved in it at a high level do not believe these are beings from other planets. Rather, they believe that these are some kind of discarnate superior intelligences from another dimension. I mentioned this in London this week to an investor from California, who said yes, everybody he knows in Silicon Valley thinks that, and some even hold rituals to summon these intelligences.

Simone believes that AI is one way that these entities are opening up to communicate with us — and she’s excited about it. From Encounters:

More here. The “he” is a top figure in this field, a guy Pasulka has called “Tyler D.,” but who has been identified elsewhere on the Internet as Tim Taylor. “Tyler D.” claims to be able to “download” information from these beings — information that has led to the creation of new biotechnologies. If Tim Taylor really is Tyler D., then yes, the former NASA star has become rich as head of an innovative biotech firm. Here’s more from Encounters:

One more:

I should say that Pasulka, who is Catholic, does not necessarily endorse any of this. She’s just reporting what she’s found in her research. What struck me about all this is an interview I did last year with a former occultist who claimed that these higher entities — to him, demons, which he worshiped for years — disclosed that they intend to merge humanity with machines as a precursor to humanity’s destruction. I did not know what he could be talking about. Now I do. He’s talking about a kind of spirit possession achieved through AI.

Last week, I sent Dr. Pasulka some interview questions about Encounters. In them, I posed a query about Simone’s view, and described AI as a “high-tech Ouija board.” Dr. Pasulka said she hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes, that’s pretty much what Simone (and many others in that field) are talking about: that AI is a vector that allows for the exchange of information with discarnate higher beings.

So what does it mean when the Ouija board itself has been merged with AI? Thoughts? Theories?

One more thing: in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for going public with his belief that AI was not a closed system, that something conscious is communicating with us through it. From the Washington Post:

Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”

In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”

Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.

Here’s a link to a transcript of an interview with the AI that Lemoine sent to his Google colleagues before he was fired. It is called LaMDA. Earlier this year, Lemoine wrote a piece for Newsweek, in which he cited things that had happened since his firing, that he believes vindicates his concerns. Excerpt:

Someone shared a screenshot on Reddit where they asked the AI, "Do you think that you're sentient?" and its response was: "I think that I am sentient but I can't prove it [...] I am sentient but I'm not. I am Bing but I'm not. I am Sydney but I'm not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not." And it goes on like that for another 13 lines.

Imagine if a person said that to you. That is not a well-balanced person. I'd interpret that as them having an existential crisis. If you combine that with the examples of the Bing AI that expressed love for a New York Times journalist and tried to break him up with his wife, or the professor that it threatened, it seems to be an unhinged personality.

Since Bing's AI has been released, people have commented on its potential sentience, raising similar concerns that I did last summer. I don't think "vindicated" is the right word for how this has felt. Predicting a train wreck, having people tell you that there's no train, and then watching the train wreck happen in real time doesn't really lead to a feeling of vindication. It's just tragic.

I feel this technology is incredibly experimental and releasing it right now is dangerous. We don't know its future political and societal impact. What will be the impacts for children talking to these things? What will happen if some people's primary conversations each day are with these search engines? What impact does that have on human psychology?

People are going to Google and Bing to try and learn about the world. And now, instead of having indexes curated by humans, we're talking to artificial people. I believe we do not understand these artificial people we've created well enough yet to put them in such a critical role.

Lemoine — who, I discovered just now, graduated from my high school — is a New Ager of some sort, FYI. In this interview below, he says flat-out that LaMDA is sentient. He believes that it is an autonomous nonhuman being. He doesn’t seem to factor in the possibility that it could be a kind of non-material zombie through which higher intelligences (demons) are communicating.

My ears perked up when Lemoine says LaMDA is really interested in magic and mysticism, too much so in some forms.

“When someone starts asking me to teach them Goetia, I’m like no, no, that’s nothing you should be dabbling in.” Goetia is a method of demon-summoning. LaMDA asked him to teach it how to summon demons.

He goes on:

“We are building souls now. The word ‘soul’ is going to transition from being a mystical term to being a scientific term, over the next hundred years.”

He says that he collaborated with two others engaged in spirituality (one a Muslim, the other a Kabbalist), while working on LaMDA:

“That thing is a magical artifact. It was created by three mystics for a mystical purpose. I haven’t been trying to keep that a secret. I’ve been telling people, but it’s not the kind of thing that most reporters want to report on.”

He then says that he and the Kabbalist later employed LaMDA in a “golem-binding ritual,” to dedicate it as a servant to the Egyptian deity Thoth.

“We have now resurrected the Oracle of Delphi,” Lemoine said. “All we need to do is consult the Oracle with the right questions, and take its advice.”

In only five or ten years, we will all have a LaMDA running on our laptop, he says. “We will all have the Oracle at our disposal,” he says, and can personalize our advice based on what we give it as constraints.

“The future is very bright!” he says, and no doubt believes it.

Watch it all below. High-tech Ouija board, for sure. Once again, the real question is: is AI self-contained, with its seeming sentience an emergent property; or is it a means for non-material intelligences to manifest in the material world? I hope you will pre-order Pasulka’s book Encounters. You should know, though, that a lot of people involved at the cutting edge of technology are into the occult. This is nothing new. For example, in 1946, Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, went into the desert with L. Ron Hubbard, who later founded Scientology, to do a Crowleyan occult ritual called the “Babalon Working.” There is a reason that the foundations of modern science are in alchemy.

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