Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

The Universe May Be Stranger Than Religion Imagined

David W. Falls writes about artificial intelligence, belief, secular meaning, and the future of human identity. This essay explores how human beings have long interpreted strange or unseen experiences as signs, spirits, visitations, or messages from beyond. Its central argument is that science has not made the universe less mysterious. It has made supernatural explanations harder to defend. The unseen may be real, profound, and astonishing without being sacred, personal, or watching us.

The piece moves through perception, pattern-making, grief, ghost belief, religious explanation, and the hidden realities revealed by modern science. It is skeptical of supernatural claims, but not dismissive of the experiences that often give rise to them. My aim is to take mystery seriously without turning it too quickly into doctrine.

Psychedelics and Language Model Temperature

The effect of psychedelics is often described as an increase in fluidity – of being, in some non-specific sense, more free to wander out of usual habit patterns. This essay presents an analogy to a feature of LLMs, namely the temperature parameter, that allows a precise characterisation of this increased fluidity. It begins with a semi-technical description of how this parameter affects the operation of an LLM, and then draws a parallel to how psychedelics affect human experience at multiple levels from perception to thought patterns and life reflections, before concluding by placing this analogy inside a larger project of using the internal mechanism of AI to better understand our own minds.

Reflections on the Evolution of Consciousness

Primarily a visual artist, Paul Forte also writes essays and poetry. Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. Influenced early on by Conceptual art, Forte has employed a variety of media over the years to realize ideas, including making and self-publishing artist’s books and related objects.
“An experimental approach to art making coupled with an abiding sense of the poetic are the hallmarks of my art. It is an art that has explored this approach and sensibility through a variety of media and artforms over the years: Word works and poetry, artist’s books and book works, performance art, drawings, collage, montage, and assemblage. Central to much of this work is the use of found or appropriated material.”

Humanism After the Algorithm

This essay examines how artificial intelligence challenges core humanist commitments to reason, moral responsibility, and human judgment. Rather than treating AI as a technical innovation or future speculation, the essay approaches it as a philosophical problem: the emergence of systems whose conclusions increasingly guide human decisions while appearing objective, neutral, and resistant to scrutiny. It argues that the primary risk posed by AI is not replacement of human intelligence, but deference to automated authority. Drawing on themes from epistemology and ethics, the essay explores how algorithmic systems affect moral judgment, empathy, personal agency, and the human search for meaning. While artificial systems may extend human analytical capacity, the essay contends that interpretation, accountability, and ethical responsibility remain irreducibly human. Written for a philosophically engaged, non-specialist audience, the piece defends a humanist framework that emphasizes skepticism, transparency, and responsibility in an increasingly algorithmically mediated world.

Chaos and Order as Design Elements in Evolutionary Biology and the Visual Arts: A Case Study of Human–Robot Artistic Collaboration

This paper investigates the interplay of chaos and order in evolutionary biology, cell biology and the visual arts. It argues that creativity in both natural and artistic systems arises from a productive tension between these two principles. The study introduces a collaborative art project in which a robotic drawing machine and a human painter co-created works, embodying order and chaos respectively. By drawing parallels between mutation and repair in biology, dynamic processes in physics, and compositional strategies in art, the paper highlights chaos and order as universal design elements across disciplines.

AI-generated images can exploit how your mind works − here’s why they fool you and how to spot them

Arryn Robbins (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Richmond.
Dr. Robbins is a cognitive psychologist whose expertise is in visual attention and memory. Her research focuses on how visual attention interacts with memory, experience, and expectations, particularly during visual search tasks in both everyday and applied settings. She explores questions like: How do we guide our attention in unfamiliar environments? How do our past experiences shape what we notice—or overlook? Dr. Robbins also addresses research questions in applied domains of visual cognition, such as design, and professional search (e.g., radiology or search and rescue). Dr. Robbins uses tools like eye-tracking and machine learning to uncover patterns in visual behavior. She is currently leading a project to develop webcam-based eye-tracking tools, making gaze research more accessible and scalable for researchers across disciplines.

The Future of AI Therapy: Promise, Peril, and Urgency

Cleandra Waldron, a counselling psychologist, shares the troubling patterns emerging with clients in her therapy room. Clients increasingly reveal details of their conversations with LLMs as they turn to AI for mental health support. Often unaware of the risks to privacy and dependence, they reveal intimate details of their lives and even medical data. A recent Sky News article reported that an alarming 1.2 million people had discussed suicide with ChatGPT. The ease of 24/7 support without wait times during an unprecedented mental health crisis—which largely operates in a regulatory void—has dangerous implications for user safety. Human psychological services have taken years to build safeguards and protections that clients take for granted, while AI poses as a therapist without any of the regulatory safeguards and protective guardrails that a human therapeutic relationship is bound by.
This article examines the real-world implications of AI therapy through the lens of clinical practice, revealing alarming gaps in data privacy, the dangers of AI “hallucinations” in therapeutic contexts, and the fundamental tension between business models optimized for engagement and the wellbeing of users. Drawing on recent legal actions against big tech AI companies, emerging research, and first-hand accounts from therapy sessions, it carefully asks critical questions: What do we lose when algorithms replace human connections? How do we balance the increased demand for cost-effective therapeutic services with common-sense protections that keep users safe?
The future of AI and its implications for therapy remain unclear. This article poses more questions than answers but aims to increase awareness and promote further research in the field of AI therapy, encouraging the implementation of common-sense policies that protect users from a therapist that never gets sick or goes on holiday.

Constant

‘Constant’, an AI film by Danny Ratcliff, follows Bailee from childhood through motherhood, chronicling her lifelong relationship with an AI companion. Beginning with Bailee’s birth in 2023. The narrative explores how trust with artificial intelligence, established early and nurtured over time, can become a cornerstone relationship. While some in our culture remain skeptical of AI technology, Bailee’s story represents what’s possible when a relationship is built on genuine partnership rather than fear of technology. The film culminates with Bailee introducing her five-year-old daughter Natasha to her AI companion, passing down the same trust that shaped her own life.

Grabbing the Tiger by The Tail: Holding On For Dear Life to The Part of Myself that AI Will Never Replace

AI uses expansive memory to make accurate predictions of the next word in a series of words. Memory and talking are fundamental to being human, and we fear that AI will replace them. But because memory and talking have built-in limits, human life extends beyond them to a part of ourselves that AI cannot replace. We have called this our “higher” or “true” self, but it is simply the part of ourselves outside of memory. AI challenges us to fully embrace this part of ourselves, since we’re in the process of turning over our talking- and memory-selves to the machines.