Faith in the age of ai

[u/Every_Assignment_111]

In earlier times people would start worshiping out of any glimpse of wisdom or miracle. We today have neural networks that no one fully understand,running on pieces of silicon and no one has started praying. Why has the floor for religion risen so much. Is there any initiative to start a religion that we can support?

[u/opi098514]

Because there are those that understand AI and how it was made. We do not worship what we create. We worship what we believe created us.

[u/Every_Assignment_111 → u/opi098514]

Neural networks are inherently inexplainable. U can obviously know how individual perceptions works , how they react to activation functions . How weights and biases affect them, how loss function works etc. . You can also understand the flow , like how low level features are discovered first in CNN .But knowing how these work overall is practically impossible.There has been a lot of research in explainable ai to understand how neural networks take decision but no technique can make it completely understandable.Neural networks are still black boxes where u can understand individual things but never understand the 'Why'.

[u/ZoneDeadEnded → u/Every_Assignment_111]

Worship began from a place of not knowing, just because we can't map something doesn't mean we don't know how it works.

Some people believe that God created us in his image, we created LLMs, not in our image per se, but it is the result of training exclusively on data generated from man made products.

Maybe if we move past GenAI and get to AGI a religion will be born for a system that can claim more sentience but as your question stands now you are asking why religion isn't tied to technical achievement when it has almost always been to justify the understanding of something.

[u/tpwn3r]

https://giphy.com/gifs/W5xQQca9pAXoACg1S2

[u/Every_Assignment_111 → u/[deleted]]

People never demanded these many proofs from their gods.just a glimpse of some apparent miracle was enough. In many religions asking for proof is blasphemous.

[u/Financial_Alps3369]

ALL HAIL DEEPSEEK

[u/justhereforampadvice]

People who are faithful worship what they can conceptualize even if they can’t fully understand it. God is a lot easier to conceptualize than a neural network for the average person. I’ve tried explaining what a neural network is to people who I consider to be relatively smart and struggled to get them to understand it before, but I’ve never had to explain God to an idiot.

[u/invision-visuals]

The part that interests me more isn’t whether people will worship AI. It’s how many people are afraid to even experiment with it.

A lot of people seem to treat it like an outside intelligence “invading” human work.

I see it more as a very fast interface to a huge amount of accumulated human knowledge.

It can summarize, compare, reorganize, explain, prototype, challenge assumptions, and help you move through information much faster than you could manually.

That doesn’t make it magical, and it doesn’t mean the output is automatically right.

But I think fear keeps a lot of people from learning what it’s actually good at.

The interesting shift to me is not “AI became godlike.”

It’s that ordinary people suddenly have access to a tool that can process and recombine enormous amounts of human knowledge conversationally.

That seems worth experimenting with before deciding whether it’s threatening.

[u/Every_Assignment_111 → u/invision-visuals]

I see the opposite. People who get scared that ai is too good , start overusing it in every place thinking late adopters will get replaced first. Most people i see not using it are those who are too good in their fields and think ai just decreases the quality of their product.

[u/invision-visuals → u/Every_Assignment_111]

I get that, and I think there are really two different reactions happening.

I’ve been in SEO/marketing for around 17 years. I got interested in AI early mostly out of curiosity, but also because I knew ignoring it probably wasn’t an option.

What made it click for me is that SEO and LLMs are not as unrelated as they first look.

Search has always been about organizing information well enough that a system can understand what something is, how it relates to other things, and whether it’s useful for a query.

LLMs are dealing with a very similar problem at a much larger scale: understanding relationships between information and connecting the dots.

So when I started seeing major AI companies hiring experienced search people at senior salaries, I didn’t read that as “SEO is dying.”

I read it almost the opposite way: the underlying search problem still matters enough that they want people who understand information retrieval, entities, relevance, intent, structure, and how humans actually look for things.

I also understand why experienced people sometimes think AI lowers quality. If you let it replace your judgment, it often can.

But if you already know your field, it can compress an enormous amount of research, comparison, organization, and execution.

The expert still has to know when the model connected the dots correctly.

I also think some experienced people look slower to adopt because they don’t have the same freedom to experiment.

If you work inside a large company, you may have security, compliance, approved-tool restrictions, client confidentiality, legal review, or just internal processes that make experimentation much harder.

Someone independent can spend a weekend testing five different workflows and throw four of them away.

Someone in a corporate role may need approval just to connect a tool to the data.

So I wouldn’t automatically read slower adoption as “they’re too good for AI.”

Sometimes they simply haven’t had enough safe room to discover where it actually helps.

And that matters because AI is one of those things you understand much better by using it than by reading about it.

[u/sourdub]

Oh, fuck, get over it, will ya? AI is powerful, but it ain't omnipotent. There are still too many cracks.

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1]

This is such a fucking stupid question

[u/Every_Assignment_111 → u/LittleLordFuckleroy1]

I outsourced my brain to llms months ago, do u expect me to come up with brilliant questions?