They deny evolution. How can they justify embracing an “artificial intelligence”? Where is the outrage, pushback? Am I missing it? It’s ok if it fits their agenda?
Is there much overlap between the suckers that believe AI is sentient and the suckers that believe in young earth creationism? IMO not, those are two distinct collections of easily conned schmucks that don’t overlap that much.
Flat Earthers deny the spearicitity of the Earth, so how can they embrace popcorn poppers?
(In other words I fail to see the reason the two should be ideologically linked.)
I don’t see why this is in conflict. Why would a Christian fundy or creationist object to AI if they think it’s just a tool like Microsoft Word/Excel?
I know of a YEC, and general science denier, that has trained his ChatGPT AI LLM that all human haplogroups can be are traced back to Noah’s sons.
(Can we please start calling LLMs LLMs because that’s what they are?)
I don’t see the disagreement about the OP’s ideas other posters do.
A lot of fundamentalist idiots like to claim that various medical interventions are “playing god” and therefore outré. Same for birth control or euthanasia even when done mechanically, not biologicially. e.g. condoms or a club to the head.
If LLMs really are about humanity developing true AI with minds to rival or surpass our own, then it sure seems like that’s be something they’d object to on the same grounds of “playing god”. Just like cloning humans or developing artificial made from scratch unicellular life.
Or maybe they’re just squicky about biology as it was understood 2000 years ago, and their all-knowing eternal god is silent on any and all subsequent discoveries and inventions.
In any case, they’re easily misled idjits. Their ideas have no a priori requirement to be consistent or even to make sense. The “nice” thing about faith is you can have faith in anything, even the divinity of a ham sandwich or an orange felon.
This is a trigger for me in that “fundamentalists” don’t even understand the religion in which they purportedly believe.
- God is intelligent and creates
- God created human kind in, according to the scripture they deem holy, “in his own image”.
- Therefore, man has a brain, thinks, and creates.
Conclusion: - God should pat us on the back and be happy.
I’ll avoid going on a real rant, but there are a plethora of examples illustrating this crap.
Sorry to trigger, but oh yeah, you’re surely right that the first thing a “Christian Fundamentalist” checks at the door is any semblance of Christianity. The second thing is common sense and logic.
I find it pretty unlikely that you have never ran across in any of the AI threads here the debunking of the false definition of AI that you apparently share with many others. AI doesn’t mean C-3PO. AI is
technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.
LLMs are absolutely, positively, completely 100% correctly described as artificial intelligence in computer science terms.
The person that I’m talking about thinks the LLM he is talking at is C-3PO because folks keep calling LLMs AI.
When someone misunderstands a term of art that has been in use for decades in an area, the fault lies in the misunderstander, not in the term of art. LLMs are AI. It is entirely the misunderstander’s fault that they assume that to exclusively mean conciousness or self-awareness.
In every field of endeavor there are insider expert terms and laymens’ terms.
It’s a darn shame when the laymen begin using a technical term in a way that greatly obscures what they’re talking about and greatly misleads them in what they’re thinking and saying.
But here we are.
Whether at this point the experts should abandon the term “AI”, or the public should, is an interesting question.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind”?
Maybe Frank had something, there.
Except that marketers and propagandists don’t seem very visibly working at dispelling the misunderstandings (or as some catchphrase goes, “it’s taking longer than they thought”). Though TBF for a lot of laypeople in practice “AI” refers just to what they use as an automated cheat to not have to do research and writing themselves, so it’s not THAT universal.
In a world where folks think research is Googling something and reading the results, not clicking on the links, just reading the Google vomit, because Google vomits and LLMs are ‘god level’ answerers of questions?
I remember back in the early 1990s heavy marketing/hype for AI being used in the actions of enemies/NPCs in video games instead of entirely predictable rote actions. The term AI was accurate then and it is accurate now.
You can read my post as a “modest proposal”. Sorry the cynicism wasn’t drawn in brightly enough.
Of course neither group will abandon the term and the public’s cat is well and truly out of the bag.
By and large the public will assume any answer-giver is omniscient and infallible. Because it’s lazier that way. And they will use the term “AI” to mean that thing, which they believe to be smarter than ordinary mortals in every way. Here in 2025. Because that’s what the commercial hype machine is telling them.
Now as soon as the current criminal regime gets a good controllable propaganda-spewing LLMbot going, that will quickly become the Oracular Fount of all Truth for many (most?) Americans. Since all competing voices and versions of “facts” will quickly be silenced.
They, in their millions, will welcome their new AI overlords. You and me? Not so much.
I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground data caves.
Hell, apparently 4Patriots is targeting Fundies with AI-Noah and his ark.
When I took an AI class in 1975, LLMs were not even imagined. The examples we learned about were chess, doing integral calculus, visual recognition, and route planning - all things we have today, mostly in our phones.
The problem seems to be that lots of people think things can only be done by true intelligence when they can be done fairly easily by non-intelligent machines. The ability for computers to play chess well was still controversial back then.
Back to the OP, one of the things creationists bray about is that evolution is impossible because “information” is created, and that is impossible without intelligent intervention. They never define information or give a cite, of course. It pisses me off, having taken information theory. I respond with examples of genetic algorithms that do create without human intervention. But AI seems an even better example.
Why? Blind spot. Same blind spot that makes them ignore all the evidence they don’t like, and ignore contradictions in their story. My experience with a fundamentalist, creationist, flat-earther is that logic is unevenly distributed in the population, and that some people are as logic-deaf as I am tone deaf.