[recursive]

> Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it? Perhaps people have to be burned by something really bad personally before they realise the limitations? LLMs are very convincing and persuasive.

Psychics are still in business. Although to be fair they probably don't have as much revenue. I think people really enjoy being told how smart and insightful they are, and how much they've really cut to the crux of the issue. This isn't the whole thing, but I think it counts for a lot.

[lazide]

A big factor behind psychics is because it feeds a deep need to believe that someone knows and/or there is actually a plan.

[ButlerianJihad]

We only need to look at the Oracle of Delphi to see that people have been seeking personal spiritual advice for millennia. And how has that been working out for us?

Even today, going to a therapist and having 1:1 sessions is a rational activity, and even covered by insurance. What do we hope to derive from therapy sessions but some personal insight and improvement?

You know, I go to church, and from my perspective, sometimes the most difficult discernment for an individual is between "The Holy Spirit's message to us in general" or "the general messaging to everyone around us" vs. "what I receive and my personal interpretation of things".

When preachers and oracles and leaders are speaking in generalities and trying to get big followings and trying to appeal to the widest audiences, that's when it's most difficult for us to determine what God is really saying to us, in our own hearts; that special instruction for our own lives. We can't actually get that from an oracle, psychic, or any 3rd party. It really needs to come from our own well-formed conscience.

And it's the same with a chatbot or LLM conversation. We can pose questions, make prompts, and get spammed with tokens and walls of text. No matter how personalized, it's still up to us to interpret that, and extract nuggets of news that we can use. It always has been.

[lazide]

Sure, and hamburgers and shakes are bad for us. Also very popular.