So the most basic fallacy I was alluding to, from people who believe you can refine your faith by talking with an LLM is this: An LLM has no subjective experiences, because it doesn’t experience anything at all. This is one way how using the output from an LLM as a source of inspiration for your faith sets you up for psychosis. You start believing things that have no basis in reality or anyone’s genuine experiences. Rather, you may start believing in machine-generated approximations from which coherence has been lost.

Reasonable, though it could be argued they are full of subjective experiences, just all mixed together.

But i expect it’s probably more about the coherence of the experience that provides the meaning in this context.

Coherence as in , one coherent explanation of a subjective experience by a person rather than a plausible sounding experience made up of many bits of experiences from a corpus of data.

But it seems your understanding was slightly different, in that people might develop their own sense of faith from experiences with an LLM itself rather than through the exchange of presumed experiences with the LLM. Do I understand correctly that you think some people attribute godlike qualities to the LLM, maybe through the presumption that it is an AGI? That would be a bit of a different discussion indeed :)

Not exactly, i think there are two different things here from my side.

The first:

I think people might attribute person like qualities to an LLM, the “ghost in the machine” as was mentioned earlier.

I wasn’t trying to imply someone who knows what an AGI is supposed to be would use that knowledge to assign godlike attributes to an LLM (a “god in the machine”).

Though , as a concept that would also be a valid example of “belief in the absence of proof”.

I don’t expect most people to know the terminology or have even an idea of what’s happening behind the scenes.

The second:

The part i’m struggling with is why “faith” in something like ability for meaning to come from LLM generated text (god-like or person-like) is any less acceptable than “faith” derived from perceived meaning in seemingly random (based on the knowledge of the time) events, like thunderstorms or plagues.

They would both cover the idea of belief in something in the absence of proof, so how would someone decide one is less valid than the other.