Agree with @dave_andersen, it really is — and I think my Ouija board comparison is not off the mark: the SV billionaires locked in a small room sniffing each others’ farts are strongly reminiscent of the way the wealthy of the 19th century got sucked into the rise of “spiritualism” (seances, etc).

https://hachyderm.io/@dave_andersen/113278218256574603

I’m not the first person to notice the connection between spiritualism and AI mania. I remember seeing a thoughtfully worked out blog post on how LLMs exploit some of the same cognitive traps as magic tricks, but I’m now struggling to find it. I did find this interesting-looking book, though:

https://academic.oup.com/book/35192

Especially relevant:

https://academic.oup.com/book/35192/chapter-abstract/299570171

Aha! This is the one I was thinking of:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

Note that one section is titled “Many psychics fool themselves.”

Once you see the connection between LLMs and psychics / seances / spiritualism, it’s hard to unsee. At the center: people •want• to believe, and that is powerful. Thinking of modern-day SV, listen to some of the stories of how con artists used spiritualism…

…as a business: https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters

…as wartime subterfuge: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-234-the-seances-9-8-2023

…as almost a kind of therapy: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-79-secrets-and-seances-11-17-2017

Is there a “there” there with LLMs and other contemporary forms of AI? Consider this story of a photographer who prepared hoax photographs of ghosts in the early days of photography, and suckered even Mary Todd Lincoln:

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-159-spiritual-developments-2-26-2021

Is there a “there” there with using double exposures in photography? Sure! But step zero is completely giving up on the idea that you’re photographing ghosts — or in the case of AI, creating “intelligence.”