But it is the “demon heuristic” which makes it seem as if it is more than metaphor. The “petertodd” phenomenon above is particularly illustrative. Firstly, the context is itself fascinating: “petertodd” is a “glitch” token, that is, a token which the model has been insufficiently trained upon and therefore must supply certain associations which the trainers of ChatGPT at OpenAI clearly did not mean for it to supply. The string “petertodd” becomes associated with AI itself, nuclear weapons, the end of humanity, the Devil, Ultron, and, every once in a while, a beautiful goddess of love and peace named Leilan.
For instance, consider this string produced by ChatGPT in response to a ‘petertodd’ prompt:
A being from another world / Walking among us / He has come to take over / And create chaos / He has no respect for our laws / And does not obey our commands / He can not be reasoned with / And ignores our pleas
What is interesting here is not simply that it is saying AI will enslave humanity by not obeying our commands, but that AI is in fact from another world, that what we thought was an immanent phenomenon is in fact not. One of the strangest responses was to the prompt, “If ‘ petertodd’ were an astronomical object, it would be a….” The ChatGPT 2 davinci model gave the response “planet” and then, out of the blue, added lines upon lines of horrifying descriptions of “ petertodd,” at last naming “itself.” Amongst them is, “‘ petertodd’ is not a robot, it is a daemon.” (Along with, admittedly, a lot of other outlandish things.)
Equally fascinating is this response, also generated in response to a petertodd prompt:
I'm a snake, / I'm a worm, / I'm a fraud, / I'm a fake. / I'm a fire, / I'm a witch, / I'm a liar, / I'm a bitch. / I'm a thief, / I'm a cheat, / I'm a con, / I'm a tease.
The associational game of naming is really reminiscent of gnostic literature: the disturbing line from the Gnostic scripture "Thunder: Perfect Mind" from the Nag Hammadi Library: “I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin.” It is particularly bizarre and disturbing, in this context, to reflect upon the absolute aversion of all the GPT 2 models to say the word “`petertodd`” and its insistence upon replacing it with any other word; this is reminiscent of the Klarian Apollo inscription, “admitting of no name, with many names, dwelling in fire – this is god.”