they don't have to, they bought it. or hired it? dunno. for all you know I'm an AI intended to keep you distracted while at the same time you're just an AI bot keeping me occupied with pointless online discussions.

even if neither of us is actually an AI, this interaction will surely aid in training some LLM in the end...

Maybe some day in the future this will amount to an "organic" way of accidentally building up a simulation of human society, that will be the only thing remaining for some far into the future aliens, who come to visit our planet. And what conclusions they would draw from this.

Slow clap.

Not today, no. But remember that IBM is critical to SERN due to the importance of IBM 5100 for time travel, so there's a bit of technological back and forth going on within the ~100 year period we happen to be at the center of right now.

Is this a John Titor and/or Steins Gate reference?

It is both, and also a way of acknowledging that GP's comment points out that the main/only ridiculous fantasy in GGP's comment is that IBM specifically is involved, and not the whole AI part.

I do regret making the joke now, though, given the wider context of the thread.

Art and metaphors are useful tools to illuminate and elucidate. I think you were able to make a good point, and the tonal shift helped situate your comment in juxtaposition to the parents’. My point was not to criticize but to make the reference explicit for those who aren’t familiar with them, and confirm my own assumption regarding your usage, as well.

How do you know if you're in the correct reality that isn't predicted by AI?

this is a really cool question!

i think the only plausible solution is that we don't know but we're just about to find out? as soon as the singularity hits we can ask the AI (...?)

then again, and thinking more broadly, all of life is one giant contest to guess the future, and later, to determine the future by taking precise action

so what you're asking means to try and guess how much of my current reality is predicted by AI (and more generally, by any possibly conscious actor) and how much is wildly unpredictable and chaotic?

What if the singularity is in the past?

Yes, loosely I think what you're asking at the end is somewhere slippery that I've been thinking as well. By introducing chaos or randomness in one's life it may be a way to incur computational cost to the "Sentinel AI" that is optimizing for predictive behavior (which humans are pretty predictive day to day).

Oddly this led me to realize that historical magic related to randomness may actually be a "thing" in such a system, and it was kind of a "wow" moment.

tl;dr use randomness to attempt to distort reality and run experiments, if results show anomalies then you may be in a reality at the very least "modulated" by an AI.

Maybe that's the new Turing test; true AGI is reached when computers are smart enough to dismiss the possibility of IBM returning to competence. For a warm-up task, ask the AI about a hypothetical scenario involving an honest and ethical Oracle sales rep.