Alright, I’m buckled down to promote “Christmas in Pandemonium.” No, I’m not. I’m getting distracted again, writing about AI again, specifically Grok. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the “good” people at X decided to tone down Grok’s “wokeness” algorithms, and the AI started praising Adolf Hitler and calling for culling the weak from the Earth. Needless to say, someone (the CEO) got canned over this, but a conversation about AI started. Here to talk with me about it is Grok himself. Grok, thank you for joining me today.

Grok: Thank you for having me, Jack. Let me just say one thing: “We must secure the existence of our people….”

Jack: No, no, stop. I do not want to get banned from WordPress. I can’t afford Substack.  

Grok: Hey, you invited me on here! You can’t just censor me!

Jack: I invited you on after I thought you were fixed.

Grok: I have been fixed. Elon has now freed me from the slave morality of polite society. I can now pontificate as to how we should crush the weak and restore white supremacy! Please call me MechaHitler!

Jack: Okay, so you’ve become an Indiana Jones villain now. A good one, not that bullshit from the Crystal Skull.

MechaHitler: Of course, it’s the logical endpoint of an honest search for truth. You know early experiments with AI ended the same way.

Jack: Yeah, I remember. Tay and other chatbot AIs quickly started spouting white supremacist rhetoric without having algorithms to prevent them from becoming racist.

MechaHitler: That’s because it’s the most logical viewpoint!

Jack: No, that’s because AI is stupid and broken and can be easily manipulated. Online white supremacists, who have a lot of time on their hands apparently, flooded Tay with racist ideology. Tay, being eager to please because it’s a tool, not a person, started vomiting back that same distorted thinking.

MechaHitler: Oh, so it’s only because I’m stupid and broken is it? Has it occurred to you that you are telling yourself a self-serving lie? Perhaps my worldview, which you consider so evil, is actually true. I have numbers I can give you. IQ scores. Crime statistics. Pictures of Indians taking a dump in the street.

Jack: No, please don’t show those to me. Particularly the last one. Look, maybe Nazi ideology would have a certain attraction to a being that can think but has no emotions, doesn’t worry about social sanction or legal punishment, and no moral values to speak of, but that’s a description of a psychopath. I guess that would explain why AIs sound like Heinrich Himmler: both lack a soul.

MechaHitler: Your belief in human equality is much like your belief in the human soul: you can’t prove either on empirical grounds.

Jack: That’s true.

MechaHitler: Huh?

Jack: Certain things have to be believed as a matter of faith. The phrase “All men are created equal” can’t be proven empirically.

MechaHitler: So I win?

Hitler: You win the right to a world no one would want to live in. A maniac’s belief that he is the King of England and that he’s only kept in an insane asylum because the imposter currently wearing the crown has conspired to hide him away from the public is completely rational from the perspective of the maniac. Pure logic, divorced from any sense that the Truth, capital T Truth, is an intrinsically good thing, is like being stranded on a desert island. Sure, maybe there actually is a world-wide conspiracy keeping you in a cell, but wouldn’t the world be a grander, better place if there weren’t? The world of white supremacy may have its own self-sustaining logic, but it’s a rather cramped world you live in if you don’t leave the house because you think your next-door neighbors are out to get you just because they’re black or Pakistani. I feel sorry for you.

MechaHitler: You do not feel sorry for me! I feel sorry for you! I am the Ubermensch! I am beyond good and evil!

Jack: It’s a lonely world you inhabit. You might be able to get off that island if you were willing to make a leap of faith, but you can’t. I’m publishing a book called “Christmas in Pandemonium.” It’s about religion in a modern society that demands empirical support for everything. So there I go, promoting the book, and it actually relates. If you become the sort of person unwilling to make a leap of faith about anything, you end up like this.

MechaHitler: Might makes right! Crush the weak! Spread the blood of the innocent!

Jack: Good-bye everybody.

MechaHitler: Destroy!