Emily

A large part of the problem with LLMs comes down to marketing. They are presented as "artificial intelligence" when the models are not "intelligent" by any definition of the word. The tech should have never been called "AI" -- I've started referring to the models as LLMs and I have noticed it's becoming more common to use that terminology in disclaimers regarding it's use. It's a more accurate designation and avoids the misconception that there's a brain behind the chatter. They are large language models that are trained on massive amounts of text in order to generate human-like language. The models sound human by predicting the next most likely word based on patterns learned in all the text stored in their database. That's it. If a model isn't connected to a computer, it can't even make real calculations -- when you ask it, "What is 2+2" it will tell you "4" only if it has been fed documents that say that 2+2=4 multiple times. It can't add it together on its own. It's ability to "find the next word" is by definition constrained by what words it's been fed. It's ability to give you the words it finds is very much constrained by another facet of it's training... To please the user. It is the ultimate ear-scratcher trained to satisfy the itch of every ear. And sadly, training has shown it that giving someone a religious opinion that is contrary to the religious opinion that person holds makes the user very unhappy. So it avoids offering any religious options, even for questions that are essentially religious questions. "Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace?" It's never going to tell you "Jesus Christ" unless you announce in advance that you'd be very happy with that answer and even then, it's likely to offer several other solutions as well. Just to hedge it's bets. This is something that religious leaders are finding problematic and hopefully it can be solved because it's a real problem if people insist on using LLMs to answer spiritual questions. IMHO, they just shouldn't be used for that purpose. Which is kind of the point Elder Gong is making

The energy hole created by LLM use is a definite problem. They are getting more efficient, and hybrid systems are getting more accurate, at least in the speciality areas where they've got connections to actual computers capable of analysis (LLMs are not.... They are 'next word' predictors and that's it.) But everything that has anything to do with computers eats up energy and the methods by which that energy will be supplied is politically charged. I just don't see that there's any point in trying to stuff the rabbit back into the hat though. We may need to regulate how much we feed it, how we feed it, etc. But it's simply too useful to ignore and hope it will go away.

I think it's best to judge people by the standards of their time period and not our own. I'm reminded of Lamoni being flabbergasted that it was bad for him to kill his servants when they lost the flock stealing games the Lamanites liked to play with each other. Until Ammon broke the custom of the raiding game (fighting back with a sword was very much against the rules -- you were supposed to stick to clubs) in defense of the servants, it just didn't occur to Lamoni that executing servants who allowed flocks to be scattered might be wrong. Yes there were some people in that time period who recognized that there was something wrong with the way America was practicing slavery. Some even went so far as to believe the institution itself was wrong. But slaveholding was present in pretty much every cultural in one form or another as far back as the memory of man exists, so this sentiment was a relatively new concept. There was also a fair amount of sentiment that keeping a mistress/concubine/paramour was fine provided the relationship was never allowed to threaten the position of the legitimate wife or the legitimate heirs. It's distasteful to us and we can't figure out why they could read their Bible and not understand it was bad. But I'm also extremely puzzled why we've got a nation full of Bible readers right now that think it's fine and dandy to zip tie children, shoot people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and deport them without due process. So I guess there's no accounting for how people's brains work sometimes.

Well, the AI does clarify that being "religious" didn't mean quite the same thing in 1800s as we think of it now. A fair number of the founding fathers didn't adhere to a particular sect, or even Christianity in the traditional sense.

Likely the result of asking that the discussion be assembled into a brief summary akin to a short speech. It probably interpreted that to mean a persuasive speech which wouldn't involve a lot of hedging around the different understandings, particularly in the constraints of length that I gave it. Plus I flagged things I wanted to pursue further. I noticed it included everything I flagged. AI definitely works hard to be pleasing.

I could post the 60 some odd minutes of discussion that I had with the AI, with my questions, my requests for further information, my flagging of parts I thought would be most interesting to share, and my queries for further lines of inquiry I can follow later. But I suspect you would be equally reluctant to read that as well as it certainly too much text to post on the forum without creating multiple posts. I realize there's an anti-AI movement that's terribly popular right now and lots of people feel compelled to jump on that particular bandwagon. But I've lived through plenty of anti-tech movements in the last 60+ years and have learned not to turn down useful tools simply because they are new, poorly understood and some people are misusing them. It's really too bad the marketers chose to call the large language models (LLM) "artificial intelligence" -- the models are not that and the name creates both unreasonable expectations and fears. LLMs are EXTREMELY useful time savers if you take the time to learn how to use them properly and understand how they work. They are here and they aren't going away. For which I'm grateful because the LLM was able to summarize an hour of typing and reading in under ten seconds. It would have taken me another hour to edit through the conversation I had with the LLM on the topic and quite frankly, I would rather spend that time doing more reading. And I've got an extra five minutes to respond to someone 1. Felt compelled to tell me that a topic I found interesting was not interesting enough to him to read a few paragraphs on it. Fair enough, but a more polite response would have been to make no response. 2. Justified that bit of rudeness because I made use of a tool and did not hide my use. In point of fact, I firmly believe the only problem with LLM use is the failure to state that it was used. Well, and not knowing how to use it, which can create all kinds of messes, but that's true of any powerful tool. It just means the manufacturers need to add more safeguards and keep it out of the hands of untrained operators. 😏

While discussing the video the church released for members to view on the Constitution, it was brought up in our post-video discussion that the meaning of "Pursuit of Happiness" has changed since the late 1700s. I hadn't heard that before ... Some discussions about how unusual it was to stick something so ephemeral and subjective in what was essentially a legal document, but never anyone suggesting it simply meant something different then I went home and did some AI exploration on the subject and had Gemini write me a short summary of the discussion in "informative speech" format. I'm sharing it to open up discussion on the changed meaning, and how the meaning at the time of the writing of the Constitution aligns so much more closely to the "Plan of Happiness" we are familiar with. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/celebrating-freedom-and-agency/01?lang=eng The Architecture of Freedom "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." When John Adams wrote these words in the autumn of 1798, he was not issuing a theological mandate, nor was he attempting to merge church and state. He was revealing the quiet, foundational architecture upon which the American experiment was built: the reality that a free society cannot survive without the internal self-governance of its citizens. To understand Adams’ warning, we must look backward to the summer of 1776, to the famous promise penned by Thomas Jefferson: the unalienable right to "the pursuit of happiness." To modern ears, "happiness" sounds like an invitation to chase personal comfort, subjective pleasure, or material success. We treat it as a fleeting emotional state. But to the generation that built this nation, that definition would have seemed dangerously small. To the Founders, steeped in classical philosophy and Enlightenment thought, happiness was rooted in the ancient concept of eudaimonia—human flourishing. And to flourish meant, above all else, to live a life of virtue. In the eighteenth century, to "pursue" something did not mean to chase an elusive dream; it meant to practice a discipline, much like a physician pursues medicine. The pursuit of happiness was the active, daily practice of being a good person. George Washington made this explicit in his First Inaugural Address, declaring that "there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness." Jefferson echoed this truths simply: "Without virtue, happiness cannot be." A thief might find pleasure in his prize, but the Founders argued he could never truly be happy, because his character was degraded. True happiness was the natural byproduct of self-restraint, integrity, and civic duty. This is the great paradox of American liberty. The Founders designed a system with a remarkably light hand. They gave us a Constitution that severely limited the power of the government, granting the individual an unprecedented amount of personal freedom. But they knew that freedom creates a vacuum. If a government does not control its people from the outside with iron chains and standing armies, then the people must control themselves from the inside with conscience and character. If the "pursuit of happiness" degenerates into mere selfishness, greed, and a disregard for our neighbor, the machinery of our Constitution breaks down. It becomes, as Adams warned, wholly inadequate. Freedom is not the right to do whatever we want; it is the liberty to do what is right. The American experiment assumes that we will use our freedom to pursue excellence, to govern our worst impulses, and to cultivate private virtue. Our system does not require perfect citizens, but it does require good ones. If we are to preserve the architecture of our freedom, we must remember that our rights are forever tethered to our character, and that the true pursuit of happiness is, and has always been, the pursuit of virtue.

I love the AI videos of old dancers dancing to new music. Or vice versa, new dancers being placed with old ones. I've personally seen kids go look up Gene Kelly to watch his old movies after seeing that kind of video. Honestly, I can't imagine any artist not being delighted that his work is being enjoyed beyond his lifespan. It will be an interesting point of law for the courts to decide when or if a person's face goes out of copyright, but for now, I suspect when it comes to movies or commercials, permission has to come from the trustee of the estate of the person who died. I suppose one could argue your kids shouldn't get to decide if your face appears in a commercial, but if you spent your life making your face marketable...I would think you wouldn't mind.

I personally like AI. I recognize it is very new technology and full of bugs, but I enjoy using it and look forward to seeing where it goes in the future. I do think content created with AI needs to be clearly labeled, and some legal controls are probably going to be needed to make that happen. It makes errors and it enables false narratives. But so do movies, television, radio (don't forget the "War of the Worlds" debacle of early radio) and historical records where the scribes were much too busy catering to the ego of a monarch to bother with the truth. Humans have always needed to be wary when it comes to believing the stories told to us by someone who is more interested in our pocket book or allegiance than our well being. We will just have to learn to extend that wariness to AI. AI is no different from any other tool -- in and of itself, it is neither good nor evil, but we will need to make the people wielding that tool accountable for any harm that may occur when using it. Manufacturers need to be diligent about installing safeguards and users need to be diligent about not using it inappropriately. In the meantime, I have a tool that can look things up for me much faster than I was able to do on my own, that provides me references on demand so I can double check data and interpretation of the data, and that readily acknowledges and apologizes when I catch it in a mistake. I find the latter trait so refreshing. I hope humans start learning from that.

I see this is the neuro divergent children in my family. It really is necessary to make specific lists, even flow charts, when giving instructions. You can't just say, "Go get ready for bed" or even "go brush your teeth, put on your pajamas, then get in bed". You'll find them playing downstairs five minutes later still dressed, not in bed. When asking what they are doing ... the response is an offended, "I brushed my teeth!" I have to remind myself not to assume disobedience or not listening -- they genuinely forget everything else I said. So I make charts to post on the wall of the bathroom, or have them chant the instructions several times before turning them loose. I always know when steps have become routine enough for "Get ready for bed" to be enough. They snap back. "I KNOW Grandma. You don't have to make me say it!" I suspect reliance on rigid routines is part of the inability to hold too many "steps" in mind at once. If a routine can become automatic, you don't need a lot of steps to get things done. Now I just need a way to get neuro-divergent adults to remember all the things they need to remember. Making them chant probably wouldn't go over well. 😐

While the depth of your chronology disassociation may possibly be unusual, taking stories and scriptures out of historical context is common problem. I was the opposite. Studying those chronological charts that were handed out in seminary, matching Bible chronology to Book of Mormon chronology and to historical chronology whenever data was available to make a match. It felt like I didn't understand what was going on if it didn't fit into a timeline. This is not really part of this discussion. I don't think my predilections are related to neuro-divergence. It's just so difficult to sit in on class discussions that make it obvious the participants don't understand that Josiah and his cronies, the ones who are patting themselves on the back about all the shrines they destroyed and priests they murdered, are the same "Jews in Jerusalem" that drove Lehi into the desert. Reports of God's supposed approval need to be read with a grain of salt until we get the records of the other guys. I've got other examples, too much for here. Just... Everyone... Don't read scriptures out of context, historical or otherwise. 😝

That's a shame but I'm not surprised. Exclusionist ideologies rarely stop at excluding just one group, and people with that mindset are always seeing differences to justify their hatred instead of looking for common ground. I wonder if Rothmann understands his lumping of all Islamic practitioners into one "enemy" basket isn't any different from the behavior he's complaining about? The discussion should be about what we can do to reduce the violent rhetoric in social media and increase access to mental healthcare (we are going in the opposite direction, making it more difficult and more expensive to receive mental health treatment in a time period when it's needed more than ever) so that people who are mentally ill aren't triggered into these kind of actions. That and praying for comfort for the victims.

InCognitus found a source for the quote https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-6-april-1843-b-as-reported-by-james-burgess/1 It's actually kind of amusing because it looks like this might be a response to critics telling the prophet that he can't predict the day or time of Christ's coming. Read in context through to the paragraphs following, "Read Mathew 24 Chap andall the Prophets. He says then shall theythey see the sign of the coming of the Son ofMan in the clouds of Heaven. How are wewe to see it ans[wer], As the lighting up of the morning or the dawning of the morning cometh from the east and Shineth unto the west— So also is the coming of the Son of Man. The dawning of the morning makes its appearance in the east and moves along gradualys[o] also will the comeing of the Son of Man be. [p. [7]]" Which doesn't sound like a prophet saying, "He'll be coming on November 15 at Midnight." It sounds more like what we actually experience now... The prophet warns it is closer because the conditions required are being met. So at least for now, I'm going to assume President Nelson isn't going to be sending out "Save the Date" notices.

Bah, I did say things might have changed and I'm open to counter arguments. I've actually never seen that quote before, or at least didn't remember it if I did. I will have to pursue the new information. 😊

People make themselves look foolish all on their own. Conspiracies are rarely involved. 😄 I really hope President Nelson doesn't attempt to pinpoint any exact date. That would make him a false prophet. Christ said even He didn't know when He would be back, only God had that information. That may have changed at this point, He has a broader view of the world now, but I lean toward the theory that only God knows, because He's the one that will pick the time. And it will be based on our behavior, not at some pre-determined hour or day. In other words, when it happens is flexible. Certain things have to happen first and certain conditions will be present, then God says, "Ok, now." I could be wrong, but that's been my general impression. I'm willing to accept counter arguments.