Woe unto them that SeekDeep

I recently received an email from someone I hadn’t heard from in a while, about how he had used the Chinese fake intelligence DeepSeek in an attempt to interpret the Zamn Fragment. I’m pleased to welcome a new colleague to the field of Zamn Fragment studies but, unsurprisingly, somewhat less enthusiastic about his choice of methods.

The email included some tongue-in-cheek references to LLM use as “forbidden magic” and “necromancy,” and my immediate thought was, You’re damn right it’s forbidden -- condemned by name by Isaiah the Prophet!

At first I thought this was just a bit of throwaway wordplay, at about the same level as changing the capitalization in the command to destroy “Ai” in the Book of Joshua. But then I looked up the Isaiah passage I had been thinking of and realized that the immediate context is astonishingly relevant to fake intelligence. The Prophet writes:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16).

Shall a tool pretend to be wiser than its maker? A fanciful metaphor in the Prophet’s day; a commonplace reality in our own.

This is the important part, though: “Their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?” By my estimate, there is a roughly 100% chance that much of what you say to a fake-intelligence chatbot is sent directly to real intelligence -- we might fancifully imagine it as, I don't know, a “central intelligence agency” or something -- and that some unknowable percentage of the replies you get back come not from the algorithm but from glowies. How could it not work like that? How could the Powers That Shouldn’t Be not take full advantage of such a perfect hiding place from which to conduct surveillance and manipulation? And I suspect human baddies are only the tip of the iceberg. Leonard Feeney’s concerns about who we’re inviting into our living rooms via television seem downright quaint when we consider who and what we may be interacting with via the black box of so-called AI.

I'll be posting about the Zamn Fragment later. I just wanted to get this out there first.