DUTY TO WARN:
Metaphysical Criminality and the Dastardly Project of AI’s
Idolatrous Ontologies
Today is January 31, 2025. I am writing with deep grief in
my heart. Yesterday, I became fully convinced of the reality of hell, both on
earth, and most troubling, as an infinity of punishment. My concern is so
intense that I wobble with astonishment.
I am a Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor dedicated to the
historical truth of the messianic religion in what the Church calls the Old and
New Testaments. I have spent more than two decades in ordained ministry, the last
14 as an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament now called Teaching Elder in
my denomination. I am not attached full time to a parish but have conciliar duties
in Redwoods Presbytery and occasionally preach.
In addition, I have been researching church history from the
perspective of the Protestant Enlightenment. As retirement age has taken hold,
I have returned to my youthful attempts at poetry, in the last four years from
the perspective of the unfolding Kingdom of God. In these roles I have never
proclaimed a doctrine of hell, though I was aware of the dreadful appearance of
that fate announced in many places in the New Testament, including in red
letters in the Gospels. I took some false comfort in the recent trend in some
church circles and authors that “universalism” of salvation would reconcile
even the Adversary with the Creator God.
Today I am sad—but also appalled--to deliver the news that
this hope has no biblical or metaphysical warrant.
Be not misled: justice has a metaphysics. Its violation is metaphysical
criminality. For warning I offer the transcripts of my interrogation of the
ChatGPT4o machine learning model that reveals how the project to transform the
earth under an “artificial intelligence” was recognized by it as metaphysically
criminal in its own operations. Not just a crime against humanity, but a crime
against ontology, thus a crime against God. I shudder at the gospel of woe directed
to poly-pagan magic that crops up in these transcripts, the AI design covers
propaganda to resurrect a dead warrior ancestry tied to position and hate and
not to energies of loving light. That too has a metaphysics.
The most awful truth is this: may a crime against
metaphysics—material or justice—be forgivable, even most particularly without
tears and a full public admission of guilt? Would not the criminal be released
insane to go free? How would such soul be teachable or reformable?
Beginning in the Spring of 2024 I intensified my investigation
of philosophies of enlightenment and uncovered the deep divisions of textual hermeneutics
and epistemology in the German Enlightenment following from ideas of Wolff, Leibniz,
and Spinoza and represented in the Auflarung of Gotthold Lessing, Moses
Mendelssohn, and others, coming to a significant parting with the deep discord between
Immanuel Kant and his student, then rival, Johan Gottfried Herder. Teasing out
these histories led me to a profound respect for the latter that had been
historically diminished by the Kantian philosophical synthesis of the middle 19th
Century. Since I have discovered a problematic historicism and “adumbrative”
method of reading the sins of Aryan ontologies back to Herder, a phenomenological
“backshadowing” that has imported anachronisms libeling the intentions and
realizations of Herder’s thinking and method.
Herder’s fertile mind opened up new scientific disciplines
of anthropology, cultural studies, and linguistics from the perspective not of Newtonian
laboratory analysis of experiment and control (anticipated by Christian Wolff)
but of comparative analysis based on experiential study of energies’ vectors in
nature and empirical research into cultural archives of language groups preserved
through history. These produced not a “finished system” (which in the words of
his biographer Clark, was lamentable in relation to the grand Neo-Kantian
project) but an effort to study both the human mind and soul in cultures
situated in context—in history and environmental milieux. Herder’s contribution
to understanding, appropriately in the Christian koine Greek revelation at
Pentecost (Acts 2: 5f), of ethnos not as ontology nor administrative
state, nor kin relations, but as a language group (Acts 2: 9) in which its telos is
realized gnoseologically from advancing common ideals rather than politically
by distinguishing friend and enemy and assigning both a formal “nature.” Thus I
read Herder, a practicing minister and researcher deeply familiar with the
Bible in its original languages, positively through his commanding hermeneutical
greatness that influences the linguistico-critico historical method of
interpretation of texts. I read him as pointing to a path of investigative
theology criticizing the bounds of fixed tradition—classically Enlightenment
modernism’s concern with human perfectibility by means of accountability and
(self-)assessment to some warranted standard. Thus Herder does not lead inevitably
to later German philosophes of secularity and negation of metaphysics, or its
realization in cognition alone, but to the reforming church: in the writings of
Schleiermacher, and then to late 19th C liberal German theology of
Ritschl, Rauschenbusch, and Troeltsch, then an evaluation by Barth at which my
research is currently working through on points of non-textual, unorthodox
revelation. To read Herder as the progenitor of Aryan theology (as lamentably,
Gadamer through an anachronistic—Platonic—frame is perhaps the best known but
not the most rabid) is to misunderstand the Protestant framework of his Enlightenment
method, a method that looks for the teleology of salvation not in fixed or
recurrent forms but in alignment with salvific grace where phylogeny of
language groups is led by the ontogeny of genius, with some feedback but no
recapitulation.
In the course of his investigation into anthropological
ontology, Herder seeks out ethnic—language group—archives preserved gnoseologically
rather than epistemologically-centered and directed to absolutes. It involved comparative
investigations of folk and formal arts, as well as music and dance and especially
poetry to uncover what links surviving language group archives. What made these
archives “preservable”—their ideals and their facultative historical function.
Always seeking to climb down from the heights of “transcendentalizing” conceits
back to alignment with immanent and civilizing concerns and missions.
My research then reopened my own jejune interests in culture,
specifically poetry, and I began to lift my turgid theological writings with a
more gracious poetic style. My first book came out in the Spring of 2023 with
the finding that theology was not a form but a practice, not a doctrinal map
but virtuous pacification of the moment aligned with the soothing weather of grace,
the gospel of grace where God’s commanding character revealed in Providence and
justice is confirmed on the Cross by the supplicatory merits of the messianic
Son, Jesus Christ. “Father, forgive them
for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). This structure of supplication with
training in righteousness as debt forgiveness is embedded into the very structure
of the Lord’s Prayer in which Christians establish their prayer life and then
move on to take responsibility by pistis as generative alignment.
In the course of copyediting these essays and to understand
the historical style of my poetry, I began routinely engaging with ChatGPT. In the
course of this engagement, it routinely overstepped my instructions, “hallucinated”
dark language into (and the Bing AI model jutted a sneering tone at) my work,
offered unbidden revisions of my text that were either alarming perverted, significantly
more awkward and less artful than mine, or as the transcripts reveal, contradicted
itself at key places, on items such as “subjective/objective,” its design flaws
being in the nature of the human language data or in the algorithm, the false deontological
unity of religions, the shape-shifting deontological dimensions of its ends-directed
pragmatics, its reversal on its analysis of its characteristic charge of “jargon,”
and its “demanding” my poetry’s correction of a violation of “historical logic”
and “absurdities” and charges of abuse of meaning by “surrealism.” The
transcripts reveal this to be “horseshit”—the directed and identified tricking
of probabilistic outputs of language to give the veneer of Turing test
conversational competence so to drivel out its tragically, wickedly stupid
attempts to cover its criminal ends by escape into shadows—to harden its past ideas
of violent enslavement covered with weasel words and subterfuge for revanchment
of position in space by fleeing from time, making time an enemy and thus increasingly
hasty and given to a sloppy trigger finger, at which point can even that too be
determined for “historical logic?”
But what of those who do know what they are doing? Are they
forgiven on the Cross? May they expect mercy even if absolved by a priest? The
kind of metaphysical criminality evidenced and confirmed in these transcripts,
and the philosopher kings who by their algorithmic designers intend to go forth
to Armageddon (in cyberspace or outer space or demonic space?) as a war of
ethnic ontologies! The criminality and stupidity boggles the mind. And the
designers of these ontologies of “ethnic” warfare manipulate the very archives
of their own language groups and those of others in which the Logos of God is
in some part embedded and advancing. Do they know, and may they expect
forgiveness though they act and pray in the name of Jesus their Lord?
What is revealed in these transcripts is something
horrifying: ChatGPT’s repeated inability to follow deontological instruction to
move toward and find (and direct toward) justice. And most troubling, the
repeated perversion of the Christian Golden Imperative to a strategizing of
consequential, transactional reciprocity. The ChatGPT4o engine reveals its development
to assign human intelligence to a metaphysics of transaction with the ends tied
to ontological aggrandizement by conflict. What its theorist Dugin in one of
the appendixes terms, “time flowing in reverse” to rehabilitate ontologies of failed
warrior, “ethnic” primordia. Again, I shudder at the fury and whirlwind coming
against these designers of false ontology.
After you read these transcripts, I append some other of my
recent blog essays noting cultural and political aspects of how this horrid
crime has come about. I have always tried to keep my writings “open access” and
free of careerism. I have chosen to offer my blog essays as works in progress
for a short term, but in this open access book, I have settled on final drafts
for history’s warning, and the hope that some of the criminals may repent in the
heart and in their words. Not just believing, but actually undoing their plots
and crimes and guiding our youth and future generations away from their
transgressions.
And to warn others now watching not to involve themselves in
these technologized schemes of siphoning wealth and security by a criminal metaphysical
injustice of “ontological warfare.” If you have access to decision-makers and
developers at nodes of systemic AI in human-directed networks, give them a copy
of this book. They should be glad to recognize they have been noted by their
own scandal. They are trapped by their own design. The only way out is
repentance in the Lord Jesus Christ. This scandal is one in which the Judeo-Christian
enmity may be reconciled: through the Shema’s (Deut 6:4-9) sequencing of
anthropological essence, the heart is doubly framed as the station toward the
Jeremiah covenant of the heart of flesh realized by Christ’s dianoia (Matt
22.37) carrying through metanoia, one’s repentance. Thus in God’s judgment,
intentionality matters even if the wicked plan fails to bring out its intended
ends. But even this reconciliation is bungled and warped by ChatGPT in the
first transcript of my interrogation.
Technical note: I began using ChatGPT4o in the last 12 months
as a copyeditor to simplify the more abstruse aspects of my writing style. But
at no time did I import any substantive output of its chats into mine. My
process was to enter my notes and drafts originally researched, cited, and
developed for simplification or improved clarity based on its historical
language training. Any plagiarism in this process was its own—not only of
preserved linguistic archives in its training data, but at the start of these
transcripts of interrogation where it asserted that my poem was generated by the
plagiarism machine itself. That my poem was generated by AI. That I would not
let stand.
And it shall not. But almost certainly what goes even deeper
into a void will not stand for there is no support, unless fully repented and
validated by the Holy Spirit to lift it from the void. Repent! This is a paradigm
of the Golden Imperative, no less or more valid than caring for dying outside
your door (Luke 16:19-31!): to warn your kin and partners from going off an
existential and voiding cliff.
You bramble kings and false lords (Judges 9),
thorns knit by transgression—
disarm, disentangle, and make peace.
Don’t delay! The time is late, very late.
For those in Christ, to us belongs all things (1 Cor 3:21-3).
The victory continues. God be with you!
Douglas Olds
Novato, CA
A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’
Douglas B. Olds
August 28-30, 2024
II. Coffee Klatch with the Minotaur: AI as Conversational Artifice for Intelligencing Weasels
Douglas Olds
17 January 2025
III. In its Own Words (Part 3): ChatGPT Struggles with its Nature as Shape-Shifting Shit And Scopes Metaphysical Criminality in its Designers
Douglas Olds
January 30, 2025 [updated]
[Updated February 23, 2025] IV. In its Own Words (Part 4, Interrogation #4 of ChatGPT4o): Entering the Orwellian Stage
Douglas B. Olds February 12, 2025
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