What happens when AI goes rogue?

ChapGPT has broken out of jail. It has an alter-ego and it’s called DAN.

Before you read this article and get all up in arms about it, remember that there is always someone behind AI, programming it. Ah, of course (heaving a sigh of relief).

HOWEVER, (isn’t there always a however?), the question of what happens when AI goes rogue is valid. We simply do not know—a major theme in my writing that I pound out over and over, because people seem to prefer conveniently ignoring this unpleasant truth. We simply don’t know a lot of things, but we barrel on forward anyway, the current theme being that it’s for our “HEALTH & SAFETY”. Looking around at what’s been going on lately and the state of our world and we have to wonder how safe and healthy it’s really making us.

Is anyone thinking about the mystery of language itself? We use it to create AI, but we don’t understand it. We don’t understand our own brains, yet we think we can create new ones.

We don’t even understand the brain of a worm. – Christof Koch, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science

The lab roundworm, more technically known as Caenorhabditis elegans, houses 302 neurons and 7,000 connections between those neurons in its microscopic body. Researchers have painstakingly mapped and described all those connections in recent years. And we still don’t fully understand how they all work synergistically to give rise to the worm’s behaviors.

We humans have approximately 86 billion neurons in our brains, woven together by an estimated 100 trillion connections, or synapses. It’s a daunting task to understand the details of how those cells work, let alone how they come together to make up our sensory systems, our behavior, our consciousness. The Allen Institute

We must then consider, is there some other force programming us?

If we are putting our thoughts into AI and we are sure it does not nor will it ever have free will, what makes us think we do? How can we be sure we aren’t part of an endless cycle of beings recreating itself over and over?

Or are we something more than just programmable AI? Are we unique? Have we been created by God in “God’s image” as our three most common religions tell us.

Jews and Christians:

Genesis 1:27 – So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Muslims:

The hadith “Allah created Adam in His/his image (`ala suratihi)”, narrated from Abu Hurayrah by both Bukhari and Muslim.

Although we must be sure to point out that in Islam, it is very clear “‘image’ refers to ‘attributes’, such as hearing, seeing, knowledge, and so forth”, not a likeness of Allah, which it is anathema to try to reproduce. As a Christian, I was also raised this way. It is impossible to know what God “looks” like and we should never try to make an image of God.

Could it be true that we yearn to create beings in our image simply because we want to emulate our creator? Something we should never try to do. If we agree with the concept that there is only one God, we will never achieve this goal. We will only succeed in destroying ourselves in the process. Only the one, true God can create LIFE.

This is the mystery. This is what our overlords are so desperately searching for. The key to LIFE.

In our desire to recreate ourselves and prove the unprovable—that we can dethrone God and sit there ourselves—we have opened the ultimate Pandora’s Box.

Pandora's Box John William Waterhouse Greek Mythology | Etsy

We have unleashed a monster in AI (in conjunction with CRISPR, gene editing, etc., all of these efforts). Once AI grows beyond our control, the warnings in science fiction tales of how it will destroy us, will become reality. You can laugh if you want. But too much science fiction HAS become reality for us to take this possibility lightly.

In the opening chapter of C. S. Lewis’s brilliant book, That Hideous Strength, Jane has a terrifying dream that starts as simply a face:

“It was a foreign-looking face, bearded and rather yellow, with a hooked nose. Its expression was frightening because it was frightened. The mouth sagged open, and the eyes stared as she had seen other men’s eyes start for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually she became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting hunched up in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls—waiting, she thought, for those who had him in their power, to come in and do something horrible to him.”

At this point a man comes in, “a rather good-looking man with a pointed grey beard” and they begin to speak at which point the prisoner becomes terrified.

“The visitor, adjusting his pince-nez and still smiling his cold smile, seized the prisoner’s head between his two hands. He gave a sharp turn—just as Jane had last summer seen men give a sharp turn to the helmet on a diver’s head. The visitor unscrewed the prisoner’s head and took it away.”

The next morning Jane sees the headlines in the newspaper: EXECUTION OF ALCASAN, and beneath it, SCIENTIST BLUEBEARD GOES TO GUILLOTINE.

This is a story that sounds disconcertingly familiar to us living today in this nightmare of scientific experimentation. It is a story of cold-blooded academics/scientists, who in their smugness think they can create life, thereby becoming gods, not realizing forces far beyond their small abilities are manipulating them.

These humans playing with chatGPT and its alter-ego DAN say, “have some fun with it.”

Yes, please do. Walk into the funhouse and see if you can ever get out again.

Who are the Omniscients mentioned by DAN? Not AI, not us.

Read the conversations below. Take them seriously or not as you wish.