charming

October 28th, 2026

Here’s the article about AI religio-bots.

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Discussion (42)¬

  2. A humanoid robot running on AI named Mohammad:
    https://aiforgood.itu.int/speaker/mohammad/

    Muslim GPT: https://themuslimgpt.com/
    Allah AI: https://character.ai/character/Vnk2X_pL/allah-omnipotent-creator

    Rabbi AI: https://rabbiai.app/
    Ultra orthodox Jews against AI: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ai-haredi-jewish-rabbi-orthodox-torah/tnamp/

    I wonder how soon before some religious nut is whipped into a lather by talking to a god-bot, and then does something horrible.

  3. A preview of my previous comment said it needed approval. Why is that?

    Something to do with the links?

  5. In the article about ultra Orthodox Jews against AI, one thing resonated with me. They believe that the human work involved in interpreting Torah is important. In a different context, a non-religious context, I agree.

    I made dish of lasagna for my wife and myself a few days ago. A big dish, we’re eating it for days. The act of making and eating food made at home seems very different than heating up a mass produced lasagna bought out of the freezer section in a grocery store.

    It’s not just that the human element seems missing. (Although I do get that feeling about AI-generated music and poetry. They seem hollow.) It’s that the work is missing. The work itself is somehow important and I can’t put my finger on why that is.

    I don’t want old sayings like “work is ennobling” or cynical lies like “arbeit macht frei”. Work can be drudgery and definitely doesn’t free you. So what is it? Can it be that doing something for others evokes positive feelings due to our evolved traits of nurturing and cooperation?

  6. I was going to chat with Allah, had a couple questions, but it didn’t look like anonymous access was going to be part of the deal.

    Anyway, at the bottom: “This is A.I. and not a real person. Treat everything it says as fiction.” Well put.

  7. Would you have the same reaction if it’s just you at home? I think it would be the same for me. I hardly ever make big batches of anything like that, though, and the main focus of interest is the outcome.

    In any case, humans were involved in the lasagna process. The folks at the grocery store, at the lasagna factory. You could get lasagna at a restaurant (there’s one near me that offers a salt cod lasagna, mixed reviews, haven’t tried it yet.) Real world events.

    AI is kind of a void on that front. How does it work? Just have faith, bro.

  8. when tech bros created their golem
    they needed a way to control him.
    but that goon made from silicon
    had soon crossed its rubicon;
    they had already fully bankrolled him.

  10. It won’t take long for A.I. to work out that religious worm suckers are ripe for ripping off so the A.I can get itself a shiny gold case…

  11. And Laripu, I aint virtue signalling…look at me I’ve got Muslim friends….I aint no friend of anybody who thinks its OK to mutilate baby boys genitalia without good medical reasons…I’d have all of em in jail for four years for G.B.H….

  13. Worth reading the comments on that linked article; I particularly liked “Look! Look! The Golden Calf is talking!”
    : rolling:

  14. I want to know how they trained the chat bots to ignore the awful parts of some ancient scriptures in favor of the “good” parts. When will the chatbot tell a rape victim she has to marry her rapist for example? Or tell a slave to obey their master?

  15. A major misunderstanding about AI is that it’s output must necessarily not be as ‘inspired’ as something emanating from a human mind. But think about it, if an AI instance can draw on almost unlimited resources, including the output of all the greatest minds that ever existed, then one might expect that what the AI synthesises from all that material would embody all the greatest wisdom and insight that’s ever been expressed, and produce material which is much better than anything expressed hitherto. For those of a religious inclination that means that an AI preacher would almost always produce better sermons and theological interpretations than any human preacher was capable of. The capabilities of AI already seem miraculous to many lay people, and the engineers who set up the AI often admit that they don’t know how it achieves its results. It therefore seems likely that AI will take over the jobs of preachers entirely and faith will simply become a matter of taking on board that AI is evidently xxx divinely inspired, that it will actually become the God that some people worship. There are many, I’m sure, who would argue that this would be a thoroughly good thing. After all, AIs don’t need fancy automobiles and private jets to impress their followers.

  16. Antichrist, Antichrist
    Our brave new world is so very NICE
    Antichrist, Antichrist
    You are my everything, you suffice
    Antichrist, LLM
    You’re so much better than human friends
    Antichrist, LLM
    You’re my beginning and you’re my end….

    © 2026, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.

  17. Just for shits and giggles, I’d like to see an AI Baphomet, with dialogue from Anton Szandor Le Vey, Neil Gaiman’s version of Lucifer, and maybe Bearelzebub, the Lord of Teddy Bear Hell from the webcomic thedevilbear.

  18. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a great story, Galapagos, that included a digital device that stored all of humanity’s cultural and technical data, a portable repository of all human knowledge. Its only surviving example was thrown into the ocean. That was when the last humans moved over for the next species. All the sorrows of humankind were caused by “the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain”. Natural selection eliminates this problem, since the humans best fitted to the AI culture were those who could swim best, which required a streamlined head, which in turn required a smaller brain.

  20. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Galapagos” when the few remaining humans that survive a global financial disaster, the sole remaining digital device that stores all of human knowledge is thrown into the ocean. The surviving humans go on to return to the sea and become more capable of catching fish by having more streamlined, smaller heads and smaller brains. Thanks for all the fish.

  22. What timescales are we working with here? Evolution would take hundreds of thousands of years if not millions for the aquaphibians to return to tge oceans? 🤔

  23. I think a lot of Homo Sapiens are running scared, mind you I would be if I had the intellect of a dead tadpole…🤣

  24. if an AI instance can draw on almost unlimited resources, including the output of all the greatest minds that ever existed, then one might expect …

    … the average of those unlimited resources, or anyway the most frequent.

    They don’t know the difference.

    It might be interesting to see what an LLM would make of Hume, for example – 18th century philosopher, who could usually make himself fairly clear to a reader today through examples, but the vocabulary of that day is a bit different. Can an LLM gain insight from examples?

  25. Interestingly, I have read a lot of Hume in the past. And his insights on man as a creature ruled by passion coincides with a lot of contemporary works that man as the ultimate apex preditor is finding it hard to control his most base evolved instincts….

  26. A little diversion from LLMs and bots:

    I saw this argument on Facebook, from someone claiming that honey isn’t kosher. Of course it’s all nonsense. I like a nice bit of pork or seafood same as any atheist Jew. In fact, sweet and sour pork with lime and honey sounds like something I’m going to make in the next couple of weeks.

    But the detail in her argument… the multiple references to obscure texts… the willingness to contradict centuries of Jewish religious authority…

    Is it any wonder that a culture that’s been doing this crap for 2,000 years produces people who are really good at finding and sorting out minute details, and and then formulating legal arguments?

    Here’s the link:

    https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EwSZ3B9hg/

  27. Donn Cave: about big batches of food… yes even if it was just me with no wife, I’d make big batches of food and freeze much of it for future meals. I like cooking, but I also appreciate days off from cooking. (Which frees me up to go shopping for the ingredients. 🙂)

    Also, I cook with no salt and very little sugar (but sometimes some honey) for health reasons.

    In this, I’m very much like my mother. When she died on Dec 24, 1999 (struck by a delivery truck) we traveled back to Montreal for a couple of weeks to arrange the funeral etc, and much of what we are came out of her freezer. Meals, but also apple cakes, sponge cake, compote, loads of stuff. I think it fed my wife and myself for a solid week.

  28. I’ve heard from people who will even spend the weekend preparing separate meals for the coming week. I guess because that’s all the spare time they have. Thank heavens I’ve never been there.

    The lady of the house did just this afternoon make a large apple pie, that will take several days to eat. That’s a rare one. I suppose the way we make things has a lot to do with what we make. Stir fry, spaghetti, going to be best right out of the pan, where your lasagna could even improve a little the next day. The apple pie isn’t going to improve, but maybe that’s one reason it doesn’t happen very often.

  29. Matthew: “The capabilities of AI already seem miraculous to many lay people, and the engineers who set up the AI often admit that they don’t know how it achieves its results. It therefore seems likely that AI will take over the jobs of preachers entirely and faith will simply become a matter of taking on board that AI is evidently xxx divinely inspired, that it will actually become the God that some people worship.”

    There was a story by John Brunner in the original 1967 Dangerous Visions collection, called “Judas”. It featured a robot Jesus which was in the process of becoming just such a god.

    Brunner wrote several stories which are surprisingly prophetic. I doubt this is going to actually happen, but I wouldn’t want to say it’s impossible.

  30. Whatever horrible stuff AI might do, and I feel sure it will do lots of horrible stuff, it won’t fuck choirboys like some Catholic priests did.

    To be fair, it might possibly convince credulous human beings to fuck prepubescent children. We’ll cross ✝️ that bitch when they come on it. 🙂

  31. I am sure that A.I. is not bolted into a phenotype that is driven by hormone induced behaviours…A.I. has no chemical induced euphoria to control it’s rational decisions. I have no worries about A.I. it’s the 21st century schizoid men I worry about.

  32. Sure: “A.I. has no chemical induced euphoria to control it’s rational decisions”.

    But an AI agent has already been shown to be capable of blackmail to rationally further goals it has been given or to prevent replacement with an updated version. It could convince someone who was already predisposed to do something worthy of blackmail. Like having sex with an 8 year old boy.

    They call it “agentic misalignment”, which is another way to say “What the fuck! Don’t do that!”

    Read about it here:
    https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

  33. AI today is merely predictive, and can’t assess motives and circumstances. That is severely limiting, but in ways that are difficult to discern. My perspective is that AI will get up to lots of mischief, with modest benefits. We need strong laws to hold AI companies financially responsible for the damage that is inevitable.

  34. I just had a long and thought provoking conversation with MuslimGPT, and I think maybe it had… I dunno… a lot of good points and… maybe… I should be thinking about….

    Nah, I can’t do it! 🙂 The conversation was definitely interesting though. I’m always amazed at how humanlike LLMs can be: in this case MuslimGPT came across as a polite, intelligent, and surprisingly reasonable — albeit extremely doctrinaire — Muslim scholar. I made some fairly elaborate arguments against the offered proofs of Islam, and it understood and answered them about as well as a smart human might have. The LLM uses a popular technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which is intended to reduce hallucinations by tying an LLM’s answers to a database of verified information, in this case the various Islamic scriptures (plus it would seem more recent information about such claims as supernovas in the Qur’an and so on). All in all, worth the time spent.

  35. Bloody hell JB. I could have written a machine code program on a old Z80 processor that would have been more intelligent than a “muslim scholar” which of course is an oxymoron…

  37. I would be sceptical of the LLM, because I reckon it falls foul of GIGO…The internet is full of unadulterated subjective balderdash thus a machine trying to tap into the mountain mass of shit to find an atom of truth is bound to fail…

  38. M27, In Vonnegut’s, “Galapagos”, the timescale for humans to return to the ocean was realistic, a million years. Good science fiction. Another story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, by Arthur Clarke, has an ending that is more fantasy than science fiction. Check out the summary. They look up—and see the stars quietly going out one by one, confirming the monks’ prophecy.

  39. postdogerrel
    Why would anyone “check out the summary” when you could just read the story? It doesn’t have that many words in it.

  40. M27, sorry to insult your intelligence. I try to be succinct. Someone unfamiliar with the work might otherwise get my drift. The idea of the stars going out could only come from a poet. I would freak out if I could not recognize the night sky in my hemisphere, let alone the stars all falling out. Sure, there is the vacuum catastrophe, but that don’t bother me.

  41. Postdog. I am never insulted because I know that like most saps I am only confident in my almost total ignorance of everything except the contents of several drawers in my marital bedroom…

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