[dingnuts]

You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless.

The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison too literally. It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.

Your proposed "resolutions" are based on a false dichotomy between total equivalence and total abandonment of comparison. Structural analysis can be useful even if it's not a perfect fit. The comparison isn't about labeling AI as "divination" in the classical sense, but about understanding the interpretive practices involved in human-AI interaction.

You're sidestepping the actual insight here, which is that humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority. That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.

[gaganyaan]

> humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority

This applies just as well to other humans as it does AI. It's overly-broad to the point of meaninglessness.

The insight doesn't illuminate.

[hexaga]

> It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.

Indeed, I hold that driving readers to intuit one specific parallel to divination and apply it to AI is the goal of the comparison, and why it is so jealously guarded, as without it any substance evaporates.

The thermometer has well-founded authority to relay the temperature, the bones have not the well-founded authority to relay my fate. The insight, such as you call it, is only illuminative if AI is more like the latter than the former.

This mode of analysis (the structural) takes no valid step in either direction, only seeding the ground with a trap for readers to stumble into (the aforementioned propensity to not clear caches).

> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.

If the authority is well-founded (i.e., is causally entangled in the way I described), the observation is meaningless, as all communication is interpretative in this sense.

The structural approach only serves as rhetorical sleight of hand to smuggle in a sense of not-well-founded authority from divination in general, and apply it to AI. But the same path opens to all communication, so what can it reveal in truth? In a word, nothing.

[albedoa]

> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.

And regardless of how many words someone uses in their failed attempt at "gotcha" that nobody else is playing. There are certainly some folks acting silly here, and it's not the vast majority of us who have no problem interpreting and engaging with the structural analysis.