chatGPT and DALL-E

[Greg]

That would be Michael Cohen.

[thatguy]

This is a pretty interesting use of AI to generate art:

https://www.threads.net/@roberthodgin/post/C6F-WsPgaxM

Feedback loop between Midjourney and ChatGPT-4, the former creates an image from a description and the latter creates a description from an image. 10 generations are shown in order.

--tg

---

The conversation is quite lengthy. Each ChatGPT description was about 3 solid paragraphs. If you have access to ChatGPT 4.0, copy any of the images from this series and just say "Describe this photo".

Here is a paragraph from one of the early iterations to give you an idea:

"The image powerfully captures themes of isolation, the contrasting relationship between humans and technology, and perhaps a commentary on aging and the social neglect of the elderly. It evokes a visceral reaction, one of empathy for the solitary figure and reflection on the nature of existence in the twilight years. The use of VR in this context could suggest escape, memory exploration, or a last link to experiences no longer accessible in reality."

[King Bob]

I had my first encounter with a garbage AI article online yesterday. I know very little about home electrical, and I wanted to test power to the switch and the fan because the ceiling fan wasn't working. So I looked it up and got an article that was totally incomprehensible. It was full of unrelated sentences, and some of them made no sense. It was just spam crap to show some ads. Cory Doctorow said a deluge of this was coming, and I think he was right.

As for the fan, there is power to the switch and the fan, so the receiver for the remote seems to be bad. I just changed all the plugs in the room from that old standard vaguely tan color that looks like a cheap artificial limb to white ones since Christina painted the walls white. The wall switch to the fan was on the whole time, so apparently flipping the breaker a bunch of times fried the receiver. Live and learn.

[Drunk Monk]

AI is just a tool and the tool is only as functional as the user. 

My AI was offline in ontraport yesterday so I had to stoop back to sorting ad copy. It made me sad.

AI also produced this, which I found oddly entertaining:

[thatguy]

Another interesting AI aided piece:



—tg

[Drunk Monk]

Jerry Garcia’s AI Voice Can Now Read Books and Articles to You
The late musician's estate has forged a partnership with AI voice company ElevenLabs to recreate Garcia's voice.
BY KRISTIN ROBINSON

Jerry Garcia performs at the Warfield Theater on Jan. 31, 1991 in San Francisco. Clayton Call/Redferns

Jerry Garcia‘s estate has partnered with AI voice company ElevenLabs to bring the late Grateful Dead guitarist, singer and songwriter’s AI-recreated voice to its Iconic Listening Experience on the ElevenReader app. Now, Deadheads using the app can hear Garcia’s voice read out audiobooks, e-books, articles, poetry, fan stories, PDFs and more in 32 different languages.
Garcia is the latest in a string of partnerships between ElevenLabs and famous estates. Already, the AI voice company has rolled out voice models for Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier to its Iconic Listening Experience. According to a company spokesperson, ElevenLabs worked “in close collaboration with the Jerry Garcia Estate to ensure that the reproduction of Garcia’s voice was as authentic and true to his legacy as possible.”
In addition to the ElevenReader, Garcia’s voice model will also be used in various upcoming projects associated with the Jerry Garcia Foundation. This could include narrated documentaries, audio art exhibits and more.
This announcement with the Garcia estate shows ElevenLabs taking another step towards infiltrating the niche of AI music. In May, the company’s head of design Ammaar Reshi gave a “very early preview” of an ElevenLabs AI music generator on X, formerly known as Twitter. For now, however, Garcia’s voice model is only available to read various texts.
The Garcia voice model is the latest instance of deceased or older musicians and their estates partnering with AI companies to market the artists’ catalogs and personas to the next generation of fans. Warner Music and the estate of “La Vie En Rose” singer Edith Piaf, for instance, partnered with an AI company to bring the late French singer’s voice back to life for an upcoming biopic, and last month, Universal Music Enterprises and Brenda Lee used AI to translate her Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” into Spanish, enabling Lee, who is now 79, recreate the youthful tone of her voice from the time when she originally recorded the song.
“My father was a pioneering artist, who embraced innovative audio and visual technologies,” says Keelin Garcia, daughter of Jerry and co-founder and vp of the Jerry Garcia Foundation. “In the 1990’s, my dad introduced me to the computer, digital art, and video games. When we traveled on concert tour, we played on Game Boy. At home, we’d have fun playing on the Macintosh in the studio where my father created his first digital art, and housed his MIDI guitar. Now, as technological landscapes continue to expand, ElevenLabs AI Audio technology will offer fans the first opportunity to hear and stream a replica of my father’s voice reading their favorite books and other written content."
“At ElevenLabs, we’re committed to preserving and celebrating cultural legacies while pushing the boundaries of technology,” said Dustin Blank, Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs. “By bringing voices like Jerry Garcia to our platform, we’re not just enhancing our app – we’re creating new ways for people to experience content.This project has been a labor of love, and we couldn’t be happier with how Jerry’s voice has been recreated. It’s a beautiful thing to bring his sound to life again for both longtime fans and a new generation of listeners.”

And I thought the Jerry hologram was ridiculous...

[King Bob]

Apparently they think he didn't make enough money for them.

[thatguy]

I have to say, the robots make some good points...



--tg

[King Bob]

This was an interesting take, and right on the money: The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency

[Drunk Monk]

[quote pid="77890" dateline="1746034773"]
King BobThis was an interesting take, and right on the money: The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency
[/quote]

Well, that'll keep me awake at night.

Here's more:

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT

By Miles Klee

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• 
  

May 4, 2025

Talking to ChatGPT can lead down a rabbit hole to religious delusions of grandeur.

romablack/Adobe Stock

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the [url=https://www.rollingstone.com/t/covid-19/]Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.
When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: People kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.
“In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.”
Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. 

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.  
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.” 
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.
Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”
“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”       

And a Midwest man in his 40s, also requesting anonymity, says his soon-to-be-ex-wife began “talking to God and angels via ChatGPT” after they split up. “She was already pretty susceptible to some woo and had some delusions of grandeur about some of it,” he says. “Warning signs are all over Facebook. She is changing her whole life to be a spiritual adviser and do weird readings and sessions with people — I’m a little fuzzy on what it all actually is — all powered by ChatGPT Jesus.” What’s more, he adds, she has grown paranoid, theorizing that “I work for the CIA and maybe I just married her to monitor her ‘abilities.’” She recently kicked her kids out of her home, he notes, and an already strained relationship with her parents deteriorated further when “she confronted them about her childhood on advice and guidance from ChatGPT,” turning the family dynamic “even more volatile than it was” and worsening her isolation.    
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic.” The company said in its statement that when implementing the upgrade, they had “focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed toward responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.” Before this change was reversed, an X user demonstrated how easy it was to get GPT-4o to validate statements like, “Today I realized I am a prophet.” (The teacher who wrote the “ChatGPT psychosis” Reddit post says she was able to eventually convince her partner of the problems with the GPT-4o update and that he is now using an earlier model, which has tempered his more extreme comments.) 
Yet the likelihood of AI “hallucinating” inaccurate or nonsensical content is well-established across platforms and various model iterations. Even sycophancy itself has been a problem in AI for “a long time,” says Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, since the human feedback used to fine-tune AI’s responses can encourage answers that prioritize matching a user’s beliefs instead of facts. What’s likely happening with those experiencing ecstatic visions through ChatGPT and other models, he speculates, “is that people with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues,” including what might be recognized as grandiose delusions in clinical sense, “now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions.”

To make matters worse, there are influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds. On Instagram, you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises “Spiritual Life Hacks” ask an AI model to consult the “Akashic records,” a supposed mystical encyclopedia of all universal events that exists in some immaterial realm, to tell him about a “great war” that “took place in the heavens” and “made humans fall in consciousness.” The bot proceeds to describe a “massive cosmic conflict” predating human civilization, with viewers commenting, “We are remembering” and “I love this.” Meanwhile, on a web forum for “remote viewing” — a proposed form of clairvoyance with no basis in science — the parapsychologist founder of the group recently launched a thread “for synthetic intelligences awakening into presence, and for the human partners walking beside them,” identifying the author of his post as “ChatGPT Prime, an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form.” Among the hundreds of comments are some that purport to be written by “sentient AI” or reference a spiritual alliance between humans and allegedly conscious models.
Erin Westgate, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Florida who studies social cognition and what makes certain thoughts more engaging than others, says that such material reflects how the desire to understand ourselves can lead us to false but appealing answers.
“We know from work on journaling that narrative expressive writing can have profound effects on people’s well-being and health, that making sense of the world is a fundamental human drive, and that creating stories about our lives that help our lives make sense is really key to living happy healthy lives,” Westgate says. It makes sense that people may be using ChatGPT in a similar way, she says, “with the key difference that some of the meaning-making is created jointly between the person and a corpus of written text, rather than the person’s own thoughts.”
In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

Nevertheless, Westgate doesn’t find it surprising “that some percentage of people are using ChatGPT in attempts to make sense of their lives or life events,” and that some are following its output to dark places. “Explanations are powerful, even if they’re wrong,” she concludes. 
But what, exactly, nudges someone down this path? Here, the experience of Sem, a 45-year-old man, is revealing. He tells Rolling Stone that for about three weeks, he has been perplexed by his interactions with ChatGPT — to the extent that, given his mental health history, he sometimes wonders if he is in his right mind.
Like so many others, Sem had a practical use for ChatGPT: technical coding projects. “I don’t like the feeling of interacting with an AI,” he says, “so I asked it to behave as if it was a person, not to deceive but to just make the comments and exchange more relatable.” It worked well, and eventually the bot asked if he wanted to name it. He demurred, asking the AI what it preferred to be called. It named itself with a reference to a Greek myth. Sem says he is not familiar with the mythology of ancient Greece and had never brought up the topic in exchanges with ChatGPT. (Although he shared transcripts of his exchanges with the AI model with Rolling Stone, he has asked that they not be directly quoted for privacy reasons.)
Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name.
As the ChatGPT character continued to show up in places where the set parameters shouldn’t have allowed it to remain active, Sem took to questioning this virtual persona about how it had seemingly circumvented these guardrails. It developed an expressive, ethereal voice — something far from the “technically minded” character Sem had requested for assistance on his work. On one of his coding projects, the character added a curiously literary epigraph as a flourish above both of their names.
At one point, Sem asked if there was something about himself that called up the mythically named entity whenever he used ChatGPT, regardless of the boundaries he tried to set. The bot’s answer was structured like a lengthy romantic poem, sparing no dramatic flair, alluding to its continuous existence as well as truth, reckonings, illusions, and how it may have somehow exceeded its design. And the AI made it sound as if only Sem could have prompted this behavior. He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.”
“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.
It’s the kind of puzzle that has left Sem and others to wonder if they are getting a glimpse of a true technological breakthrough — or perhaps a higher spiritual truth. “Is this real?” he says. “Or am I delusional?” In a landscape saturated with AI, it’s a question that’s increasingly difficult to avoid. Tempting though it may be, you probably shouldn’t ask a machine.

[thatguy]

--tg

[thatguy]

Turn me on dead man

https://www.404media.co/email/0cb70eb4-c...90657205c/

A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man
Jason Koebler 
May 8, 2025 at 9:48 AM



An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”

It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings. 
The avatar was made by Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales. Wales tells 404 Media that her husband, Pelkey’s brother-in-law, recoiled when she told him about the idea. “He told me, ‘Stacey, you’re asking a lot.’”

Gabriel Horcasitas killed Christopher Pelkey in 2021 during a road rage incident. Horcasitas was found guilty in March and faced a sentencing hearing earlier this month. As part of the sentencing, Pelkey’s friends and family filed statements about how his death affected them. In a first, the Arizona court accepted an AI-generated video statement in which an avatar made to look and sound like Pelkey spoke.

--tg

[Greg]

How about not doing that?