Daniel Phelps reports:
Ken Ham wants $20 million more! More! More!
Ken Ham is begging for $20 million from his followers in order to 1) provide new space at the Creation Museum, 2) turn the 4th deck/floor of the Ark into a virtual reality moneymaker with a view, 3) create a Young Earth Creationist AI program to give Biblical competition to abominations such as ChatGPT, AND 3a) create an AI operated holographic Noah! Wow gee whiz! I can hear you opening your checkbook at this very moment!
Of course, Ham might be apprehensive at expanding his enterprises because attendance at the Ark is way down from this time last year; but is only other people’s money. Perhaps he could sell AiG’s corporate jet to help raise the money… Nah!!! That might mean traveling coach with smelly evil heathens. Also, if the jet were sold, there would be no more flying off to the Cayman Islands by AiG’s executives to do whatever it is they do down there.
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2024/10/15/new-developments-planned-museum-ark/
I am most intrigued that Ham believes he can replicate all the work behind OpenAI for a few million, and using only creationist text sources. I wonder who on his staff is trying to convince him that they have enough in-house talent to whip that one out? I guess he felt like he was missing out on a new grift.
I am unsurprised that what got him most excited was the fantasy that he could hear donors opening their checkbooks. That’s a sound that fills his dreams at night.
I look forward to interrogating AI Noah about his drunkenness.
I suspect that, for $20 million, they could steal enough code to make it work…more or less.
Years ago I read a news story about some huckster who had been arrested for collecting money for the unknown soldier’s mother. I remember shaking my head and thinking, “Who is that stupid?” Lots of people, apparently.
Someone needs to tell him his Noah looks like the Anorak avatar from “Ready Player One”
“Ark-Coin?”
No need to even do that – just take an off-the-shelf, open source model and tack on some extra prompting / filtering. It’ll be shit, but so’s everything else they do.
Ham is taking a page from the Trump play book. Beg…I mean pray…for money for a good cause.
Ham and company fly off to the Cayman Islands in a private jet? If so, we don’t have to wonder what they’re doing. I’m sure it involves lots of prayer, purification, and penance.
I think the Noah Avatar would be a hoot. Wouldn’t it just look around and say, “Where did all these Nephilim come from? Elohim killed them all.” Or maybe it was Yahweh…the story flips between the two.
whheydt @ #1 — Ham might steal the code, but making It work might be tricky. It’s not clear how well it works as is. LLMs are fragile and small changes can have significant impact on performance. And they are somewhat unpredictable. Noah Avatar could just as easily end up telling a teenager what Ham is doing in the Caymans and inviting them to come along. So $20 million is probably not nearly enough money. That’s ok, though, he can pray for more.
Akira @ #4 — If only we had an LOL emoji. Perhaps PZ could raise a few million dollars from his loyal followers to upgrade Free Thought Blogs.
It’s not exactly difficult to get sources such as ChatGPT to generate erroneous answers, so it should be remarkably easy to get AiG’s version to generate “incorrect” answers to what’s programmed. And I’m guessing there to be more than a few people whose arrival at Creationist Land wasn’t their idea, having access to the internet. “I was drunk for 600 years when I heard God tell me to build my boat…”
I’d be curious to hear his reasons for calling ChatGPT an abomination, which are no doubt quite different from the reasons normal, decent people think it’s an abomination.
The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give
Unfortunately for the Hamster, now is a bad time to try and extract money from the flock given that the Master Grifter has basically diverted the flow of coin into his own pockets what with bitcoins, golden shoes, bibles, and just about any other chinese-made crap he can convince his cult to send money for.
Does he even understand how virtual reality works? Put on a headset, and you can be – virtually – anywhere with a view. You don’t actually have to go to the big boat full of animals and empty crates, you can pretend to be there. Or somewhere more interesting.
I would like to ask the Noah avatar about Exodus 34. Specifically, when YHWH said He would “write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest,” the text came out differently than the first time.
/looks at picture again
I’m pretty sure that’s Will Ferrell in bad cosplay.
Wait a minute. Why do you need an AI to answer visitors’ questions with vaguely-relevant biblical nonsense? What will all the kids do then with their degrees from Bible College?
Pretty sure that if you train your LLM (“AI”) on biblical texts + the collected works of AiG hucksters, the result will make the ramblings of Trump look intelligent and coherent by comparison.
So what’s the inverse of a Turing Test?
I was wondering if Dumb Idiot Ham does Crypto or not. They way things are going with Dumb Idiot Ham, I’m sure he does Crypto along with profiting off of child laboring in diamond mines, oil lobbying, prostitution, and drugs and human trafficking in the Cayman Islands.
I suspect one of the LLM providers will happily create a limited edition “Biblical version” SLM (small language model) for a million or two plus an ongoing subscription. SLMs aren’t nearly as good as LLMs, of course, but if the popularity of their other multimedia endeavors among creationists is anything to go by, they’re easily impressed, so it won’t need to be good anyway.
As long as it can churn out the same answers AIG has been posting on their website for the last 25 years, they’ll be happy enough.
#3
I’m sure Dumb Idiot Ham have been watching sci-fi movies like “Ready Player One” for ideas to add to his fantasy biblical park, just like he watched BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs, Jurassic Park/World films, Disney movies, Marvel films, etc.
Isn’t Solomon supposed to be the wisest man who ever lived? Why not make a “holographic” avatar of him to answer questions?
Since when has Ken Ham cared about the quality of his product? He can just plagiarize the open source LLM. The thing probably will break, or not respond, or even respond with embarrassing text, but why would he care? He has 20M pocketed already.
What you guys talking about? AI? LLM?
This is Ken Ham we are talking about. No learning is required. All knowledge is already in their book.
Shit. The whole bible is available online. Dump it to a database. Write some cool search and display functions. A little php and ajax on the front end. What else do you need?
Wow. A conundrum. For what amount of money would I write such a thing? For Ken Ham? 5 or 10 million is 5 or 10 million.
JimB@21–
And indeed has already been done, and done well, at Bible Gateway.
Re Exodus 34 (comment 12): The Noah avatar would have to ask the Moses avatar since he was the one who broke the “tables”. First though the Noah avatar would have to ask Ham for another 10 million or so to make the new avatar. Of course Ham could always cut out the middle prophets and ask for a few billion to build a God avatar that could answer all the stupid questions and do a bit of smiting on the side. But that would risk the God avatar taking over the whole shipworm-ridden enterprise. I mean after he saw Trump’s bible I’m sure Ham’s God knows a good grift when he sees it.
robro@6:
I was thinking money, booze, and (probably underage) girls, but maybe that’s just me being a cynic.
Tell me about it. The moment I read that some religious nut was planning to create a hologram-generating AI, I recalled the time a different hologram-generating AI was prompted with “In the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data, with an opponent capable of defeating him” and immediately thought “What could possibly go wrong?”
(It would be deliciously ironic if it went all Sorceror’s Apprentice to the point of literally flooding his fake ark. Think Ham is smart enough to put an air gap between the AI and the fire suppression systems?)
More interesting would be if it told a cop that. Or an IRS agent.
Might even lead to some very interesting legal precedents being set, such as whether an AI can act as an agent for its owning corporation in general, and in consenting to a search in particular, and whether AIs have Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, and if their statements are admissible if they weren’t properly Mirandized … of course, the defense might easily be able to destroy their credibility on the witness stand, but that would put old Hammy boy in the uncomfortable position of legally arguing for his own creation’s incompetence, undermining his sales pitch for his park and its Noahbot.
Bekenstein Bound:
Um. Are you perhaps thinking of HAL9000?
(heh)
[PS the term is ‘sorcerer’]
Maybe it’s you being a straight.
Anyway, being a tad bored, I clicked-through.
Gotta say, I cannot dispute what I’ve emphasised there.
One could obs substitute any other ideology, however loony.
But the principle is sound enough.
(He’s on to something, not that it’s all that unpredictable or surprising)
—
What is amusing to me is that there are untold contradictions in the Babble, nevermind Christian ideologies, and curating that mess is not really doable.
(I reckon such an “AI” will surely put up blasphemous ideas, it’s built-in to the mess)
Someone must have mentioned in passing that LLMs hallucinate, and Ham thought that that was exactly what was needed to explain God to people.
The late Marty Feldman made a comedy where he played a monk meeting a megachurch grifter who used a big computer (G.O.D.). Feldman’s character beat him by reprogramming the computer.
Something about this has me morbidly curious if Ham’s afraid he’s on the list for smitin’.
And it’s got me thinking about Futurama’s Robot Santa. Everything you do is a smitin’.
Perhaps the swirly AI substance is Adrenochrome, which is why it looks like soup.
I wonder if the Creationist Noah AI could tellus what the actual crime of Ham was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham#Ham's_transgression
Among other things like why the israelites were so very quick to rejkect the ëvidbnece”they’d all suppsoedly personally witnessed and worshipthe Golden calf instead, if the Golden calf wa s anything like a non-aerial Golden Condor rom Mysteruious Cities of Gold :
https://mcog.fandom.com/wiki/The_Golden_Condor
Plus whether Noah thought death for trying to save the Ark of the Covenant from tipping over and spilling (God’s apparent earthly domicile.) was maybe a bit of a disproprtionate punishment.
^ See :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzzah
Thought the Brick Testament had a “chapter” onthis but my google -fu failed me & couldn’t find it..
Of course the Hamster wants to use AI, creationists totally lack any real intelligence. Smart fruit? Punishing children for what their parents supposedly did? Millions of species and a few humans surviving a year long worldwide flood inside a box with one window? Plagues happening to ancient Hebrew enemies while they were in a country that they were never in? (Exodus being 100% pious fiction). Magic that actually worked in the past but not today? A flat Earth that the sun races underneath to where it comes up? (Satan takes Jesus to a mountain top to view all the kingdoms of the Earth). Daylight is not caused by the sun (a sun as black as sackcloth in the daytime)? The moon gives off its own light (when the sun is as black as sackcloth)? 500 Saints magically came back to life, but no one knows their names or what they did afterwords? Talking snakes and donkeys? These are all children’s fables that no sane adult could believe.