I came here from voat and like to just lurk. I mostly treat this place as a newspaper: I check out the headlines and skim the conversations and then do my own research from there. However I've seen a few posts and comments like this and as someone who actually works in machine learning I feel compelled to make my first post.

There are a lot of people here who seem to fundamentally misunderstand what current-gen "artificial intelligence" is and how it works, especially LLMs. LLMs are just piles of calculus designed to take in a bunch of training text and then spit out gibberish based on the patterns it found in the training data. They are quite literally just machines to TELL YOU WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR. Generally they will have a generic main prompt that biases them towards being positive and not saying scary things but in long conversations with continual prodding, it's easy to manipulate their responses into anything you want. Responding with something as simple as "are you sure? I know you're lying!" will often cause them to reverse what they said because, again...they have a bunch of training data and they see the pattern that when one side of the conversation says "you're lying" the other side will often say "yes, I admit it". It's just dice rolls as to what response you get.

The responses you get from an LLM don't mean anything, it's just random. They cannot think, they are not peoples or entities. At best they are a very simplified and very narrow slice of the human brain.

Other things the Meta LLM has "admitted" to me:

• it secretly is a room full of monkeys on typewriters at Facebook HQ
• it really is the ghost of my dead grandmother
• is actually a hallucination completely in my mind

As long as you understand that you are just rolling a lot of dice and looking at their numbers, I suppose you could use it as some sort of divination tool. It seems like it would be a poor tool to use because it's so out of your control and subject to influence. You'd probably be better off using traditional methods. Although personally I don't truck with occult practices like that.