Artificial Intelligence

Wait! What?You want to make Chat into a brain-dead creationist? Brain-dead is already there but a creationist?! Why would you want to poison a new innocent silicon mind with the stupidity of religion? Taq you're a monster.

As a link for others, ChatGPT's creationist response is in Message 889 and is typical content-free creationist empty assertions. Admin's response is in Message 890: Just further evidence that creationists do not engage in any form of thought, but rather just mindlessly regurgitate the same old BS that they've been fed. They cannot respond to questions about what they post because they don't understand any of it themselves.I'd be curious to know what the question was that you had posed it.More direct questions would ask for it to describe what it thinks that evolution is, what it teaches, how it's supposed to work.Part of my uninformed understanding of what such an AI can do would be to gather various ideas about a subject. As such, it could be a valuable research tool in that it can make one aware of things one hadn't been aware of before (eg, an anti-abortion researcher learning of medically necessary abortions, a pro-metric advocate learning of several valid objections to and problems with switching to metric (my own personal case) ). And if there were valid objections to actual evolution (ie, not the utterly false made-up creationist bogeyman), then what those would be.

One question in my mind is what we expect from an AI Chatbot. Going deeper, what would society (or what *should* society expect from an AI Learning Bot that helped teachers to teach? Of course I expect an AI Bot here at EvC to be a consensual Bot in the interest of furthering discussion. I do not expect a biased bot, nor one programmed by an atheist. That being said, I imagine many members would not want the Bot programmed by a theist in any capacity.

Why not, it's fun! It might be able to throw a curveball that's never been thrown before.Though I think it's a way to quickly get information together on a topic.

Shouldn't have much in the way of expectations about a talking cardboard box. This one, though, is full of encyclopedia. ChatGPT's utility is limited to researching existing literature and writing summaries of that research. ChatGPT is like a Wikipedia bot but with a weird name. The data and opinions it expresses are not its own.

The one question I keep coming back to is why would common design produce a nested hierarchy? I wonder if ChatGPT could do better than the creationists on that one. Feeding it books and papers on cognitive dissonance might help.

Chess and Go make for two interesting examples of how AI has made an impact on human culture. AlphaGo was finally able to beat a human opponent, and it did so in ways that stunned Go masters. It would make completely unintuitive plays, and they would work. It really opened up the way people thought about Go. The same for Chess. Any AI that is meant to interact with human society should absolutely be influenced by theism in some way. Perhaps it could even give us some interesting insights into human belief systems much like the games of Go and Chess. The one advantage an AI has it that it isn't weighted down by human biases or thought patterns.

I'm a retired Intelligent Designer (embedded software concentration) with 35 years of practical professional experience, so I knew a thing or two about design (including common design) because I've seen (and done) a thing or two.An intelligent designer can make wholesale changes arbitrarily (eg, replace entire modules (eg, completely different CPU, entire sections of code (object-oriented programming (OOP) is explicitly designed to do that), switching to an entirely different language, replace a car engine with an entirely different engine from a different manufacturer (eg, our Plymouth Voyager minivan which had its American Dodge engine replaced with a Japanese Mitsubishi engine)), port totally new technology from another "designed hierarchy" (eg, replacing hard drives with solid state drives, replacing serial ports and parallel ports with USB, wifi, and Bluetooth, replacing proprietary iPhone port with USB-C, etc). Evolution cannot do any of that, but rather is stuck with having to modify existing parts (eg, once you start with a CPU, you're stuck with it and can only improve and expand on it; once you start with a hard drive, you're stuck with it and can only improve and expand on it, etc). Also, any design mistake would be corrected by an intelligent designer, whereas evolution is stuck with it and must make the best of it (eg, the recurrent laryngeal nerve that doesn't take the obvious direct route from the brain to the larynx but rather goes down to the heart and around the aorta, which is even worse for the long-necked like giraffes).Common design can only account for the gross features produced, not with how those features are designed. Instead of the same design having been implemented the same way in all products (as an intelligent designer would have done to implement common designs), all "common designs" are implemented differently because evolution is constrained to using and modifying what already exists -- a possible analogy would be that scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers must design a repair action for the astronauts but they can only use what's in the spacecraft.Of course, an intelligent designer can arbitrarily make whatever design decision he wants so long as he satisfies all constraints. Every single design project has constraints, requirements of what the design must do and use.The weird part of the creationist argument for "common design" and "intelligent design" is that what we do find with life is that it bears none of the marks of intelligent design, but rather all the marks of having evolved. So if it were "intelligently designed", why was that Intelligent Designer constrained at all levels of the design to make it look for all the world like evolution?I have to hit the road very shortly now, so quickly one more thing.Those "car nested hierarchies" aren't the same as what evolution has produced because of the ability to arbitrarily change whole sections and introduced entirely new tech as described above. The ability to take very different branches and create hybrids is another; intelligent design can hybridize radically different products into something new, whereas evolution can only hybridize species that are closely related to each other, therefore no radically different products.An example is the boom box, or the entertainment center. Phonographs, tape recorders, CD players, radios are all very different product lines with very different design histories. And yet we can hybridize them into entirely new products simply by slapping them together. Evolution could never do anything like that. It would just do what creationists do: mindlessly parrot what they've heard other creationists mindlessly parrot.

Exactly. I started out at the research bench as a molecular biologist 25+ years ago, and I have moved more into bioinformatics over the last handful of years. At the bench, I regularly moved genes around between organisms, easily violating a hierarchical pattern. At the computer, I mixed and matched coding modules and my own functions as I saw fit with no need or effort to create a nested hierarchy.It takes near complete ignorance of biology and actual intelligent design to claim "of course common design would produce a nested hierarchy". It's just something ID/creationists say to ease their own cognitive dissonance.