Attack of the goblins

Don't worry, the techbros tell us.  AI is gonna be awesome.  Look at how much it can do, how fast it's improving.  At the same time, the scoffers tell us that okay, maybe it's pretty impressive, but keep in mind it's just completely deterministic software, and its failings happen mainly because it's been trained on questionable input.  You hear the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" pretty frequently, usually along with a shrug of the shoulders.

What both of these viewpoints fail to acknowledge is how freakin' weird some of the AI/LLMs have been acting.  We had a guy named Matt Schlicht creating an AI-only social media site called "Moltbook" -- in 72 hours, over a million AI accounts had joined, and within a week they'd created their own religion, called the "Church of Molt."  Just a few weeks ago, a company called Just Like Me launched an AI Jesus, trained on the King James Bible no less, whom you can have a chat with for $1.99 a minute.  AI Jesus is a vaguely Middle Eastern-looking guy with long tousled hair and a gentle smile, and although the company says in the fine print that this "is not Jesus Christ himself, and does not possess divine authority," I can only imagine the effect such a conversation might have on someone who is already a true believer.

But if you think this is as weird as it gets, I got news for you.

Open AI's ChatGPT -- one of the most widely used AI/LLMs in the world -- has suddenly developed a strange affinity for...

... I swear I'm not making this up...

... goblins.

The problem apparently started last November, when there was a strange uptick in ChatGPT's use of words like goblin, gremlin, and troll.  At first, it just seemed like a quirk, and that perhaps it was happening because people heard from friends that they'd been getting responses involving mythological humanoids, so they put in prompts themselves that generated such output.  But it quickly became obvious that this was more than a blip caused by the users' own prompts.  By the time ChatGPT 5.4 came out two months ago, the use of gremlin had risen by 52%, and goblin by 175%.  And it continued to accelerate.

"The problem evolved from a minor quirk into a persistent 'verbal tic' that was showing up in almost every user conversation," said a company spokesperson.

The origin of the problem, Open AI claims, is that one of the settings you can use when you set up your AI's profile is a persona called "Nerdy," which is described as follows:

You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human.  You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking. […]  You must undercut pretension through playful use of language.  The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed.  Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the trap of self-seriousness.

Apparently during training, humans who were reviewing the "Nerdy" AI responses to prompts and questions unconsciously rewarded them for using language involving mythological references, such as calling a dangerous place "a troll's lair."  This created a feedback loop in which such "quirky" responses multiplied.  Then, because there's no hard barrier between the different styles of AI personalities -- they're often trained from the same datasets -- the goblins jumped into other personas, and soon, they were everywhere.

The coders started frantically trying to find a solution, and they found the only thing that worked was a top-down, brute force command: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

I'm not sure how the raccoons and pigeons got involved, but may as well cover your bases, I guess.

Anyhow, this has more or less fixed the immediate problems, except for two things -- one funny and one not so funny.

The funny one is that of course the conspiracy theorists think that goblins are showing up in ChatGPT because there actually are goblins -- well, electronic ones -- within the internet, and they're trying to get out.  Or warn us of something.  Or steal our souls.  Or destroy the world.  You know the drill; something odd happens, and the modern Chickens Little start running around claiming the sky is falling.  Then, it turns out there's a completely prosaic explanation for what happened, and they calm down for exactly 5.8 milliseconds until they find the next odd thing that's trying to kill us all, and they move on to that, ad infinitum.

The less funny thing is that this kind of unexpected response is an indicator that we really don't have any good way of predicting what AI is going to do.  Okay, yeah, it's running on a purely deterministic machine, but that doesn't mean that its behavior is going to be predictable; hell, the human brain is (at least according to a lot of neuroscientists) a deterministic machine, and we humans can be mighty fucking unpredictable at times.  There's this thing called an emergent property -- something that comes out of the interactions of the parts of the whole, and could not even in principle be predicted from watching the behavior of the pieces in a purely reductionistic fashion -- and AI is looking like it's going to have some emergent properties that will take some monitoring.

We lucked out this time that the "goblins" thing turned out to be more of a quirky nuisance than a real problem, but there's no guarantee that'll be the case next time.  Consider, for example, that just a couple of days ago, an AI being used to handle a routine task for a software company called PocketOS deleted the company's entire database within seconds of being activated -- bypassing all of the security firewalls by using a programming token key no one at the company even knew existed.

And our government "leaders" are gung-ho about turning over our nation's fiscal management and defense to AI-based systems.  Hello?

What the fuck are you people thinking?

Anyhow, like I've said before, so often I'm getting tired of hearing it my own self, we need to put the brakes on AI.  Like, now.  Not that anyone's going to.  The "Oh, it won't happen to me" thing is just too strong.

I'm just hoping the next round of goblins that are released don't have their fingers on any literal triggers.

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Attack of the sex goblins

Because I'm tired of doing what we've done here lately, viz. looking at horrible scary things that could wipe out the human race if we don't for pity's sake do something, today I'd like to consider:

Sex goblins.

I mean, maybe they want to wipe out the human race, too, but all things considered, it sounds like a more pleasant way to go than coronavirus, climate change, a supernova, or a death asteroid.

The ball got rolling in this case because of an article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia that started me thinking about why paranormal creatures always seem to show up amongst people who already believe in them.

Odd, isn't it?  And I'm not talking about cryptids, per se -- creatures that, if they exist, might be expected to have a native range just like any other animal.  I'm talking about real supernatural entities -- and I use the word "real" with some trepidation -- like the Jinn (who, strangely enough, are never seen outside of the Middle East), Trolls (more or less limited to Scandinavia), and the Tokoloshe (ditto South Africa).

It's a funny thing.  I mean, if they really are powerful, and can appear wherever they want to, I would think that on the whole it would be more effective for some of these creatures to show up in front of complete non-believers.  Like, at a meeting of the U. S. Senate, or something.   Can you imagine? Especially if it was the Tokoloshe, a grotesque being that is supposed to run around naked, and to have an enormous penis and only one buttock.

I don't know about you, but I would love to see the look on Mitch McConnell's face.

But it never happens that way.  The big, dramatic appearances are always around people who already are convinced such things exist.  Usually while they're alone.

I wonder why that is.

In any case, the article was about an incident at a school in Zimbabwe a while back, wherein Headmaster Peter Moyo was accused of terrorizing his students with goblins that were under his command.  Why Mr. Moyo would do such a thing isn't clear, and the specific accusations are peculiar, to say the least:

Villagers in Dongamuzi area under Chief Gumede in Lupane are demanding the transfer of Ekuphakameni Secondary School headmaster Mr Peter Moyo, whom they accuse of owning goblins that have been terrorising pupils and teaching staff at the school. Last term lessons at the school were disrupted for almost two weeks after teachers abandoned the school following several nights of sexual abuse by the alleged goblins... 

Female teachers at the school claimed that during the night they would dream making love to someone and woke up the next morning with signs that they would have actually had sex during the night. 

Some male teachers also claimed that they woke up every morning wearing female panties whose origin they did not know. 

Villagers have called for the transfer of the school head whom they say was fingered during a recent cleansing ceremony held at the school.

My first reaction is that given the nature of the accusations, they could have chosen their wording better than to say that Mr. Moyo was "fingered" at the cleansing ceremony.

Be that as it may, the ceremony appears to have helped:

A cleansing ceremony dubbed Wafawafa, was held at the school on 5 March this year by the International Healers’ Association, during which the villagers say Mr Moyo was exposed after an assortment of paraphernalia associated with witchcraft was recovered from his bedroom. 

A village head from the area, Mr Emmanuel Chasokela Maseko, said normalcy had returned to the school since the cleansing ceremony was held but insisted that Mr Moyo should be transferred from the school as he was a risk to the community.

So... Mr. Moyo was exposed, was he?  Okay, that's it; you need to repeat the journalism class in "Avoiding Double Entendres."

But anyway, what strikes me about all of this is that (1) the appearance of panties and the "signs of having had sex" could both be accounted for by the people in question actually having had sex, and then not wanting to admit it; and (2) the goblins seem like a convenient way to get rid of the headmaster, especially if he knew about the nighttime shenanigans and was trying to put a stop to them.  Only a supposition, but this seems more likely to me than there being a real Pack of Sex Goblins under Mr. Moyo's command.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Armandeo64, Goblin by armandeo64, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But since the authorities obviously believe in goblins who visit at night to have their wicked way with you, it appears that poor Mr. Moyo is out of a job.

So that's our excursion into the regional nature of supernatural entities.  It's a pity, really.  I'd love it if a Frost Giant showed up up at one of Donald Trump's pandemic press briefings/free Re-Elect Donald Trump campaign commercials.  Can you imagine?  Especially if the Frost Giant took it upon himself to smack the absolute shit out of Trump every time he lies.

That might make them actually worth watching.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Attack of the sex goblins

It strikes me as kind of curious that paranormal creatures always seem to show up amongst people who already believe in them.

Odd, isn't it?  And I'm not talking about cryptids, per se -- creatures that, if they exist, might be expected to have a native range just like any other animal.  I'm talking about real supernatural entities like the Jinn (who, strangely enough, are never seen outside of the Middle East), Trolls (more or less limited to Scandinavia), and the Tokoloshe (ditto South Africa).

It's a funny thing.  I mean, if they really are powerful, and can appear wherever they want to, I would think that on the whole it would be more effective for some of these creatures to show up in front of complete non-believers.  Like, at a stockholder's meeting, or something.  Can you imagine?  Especially if it was the Tokoloshe, a grotesque being that is supposed to run around naked, and to have an enormous penis and only one buttock?

I don't know about you, but I would love to see the look on Donald Trump's face.

But it never happens that way.  The big, dramatic appearances are always around people who already are convinced such things exist.  Usually while they're alone.

I wonder why that is.

The question comes up because of an incident at a school in Zimbabwe last week, wherein Headmaster Peter Moyo has been accused of terrorizing his students with goblins that are under his command.  Why Mr. Moyo would do such a thing isn't clear; and the specific accusations are peculiar, to say the least:

Villagers in Dongamuzi area under Chief Gumede in Lupane are demanding the transfer of Ekuphakameni Secondary School headmaster Mr Peter Moyo, whom they accuse of owning goblins that have been terrorising pupils and teaching staff at the school.  Last term lessons at the school were disrupted for almost two weeks after teachers abandoned the school following several nights of sexual abuse by the alleged goblins...

Female teachers at the school claimed that during the night they would dream making love to someone and woke up the next morning with signs that they would have actually had sex during the night.

Some male teachers also claimed that they woke up every morning wearing female panties whose origin they did not know.

Villagers have called for the transfer of the school head whom they say was fingered during a recent cleansing ceremony held at the school.

Notwithstanding the fact that given the nature of the accusations, they could have chosen their wording better than to say that Mr. Moyo was "fingered" at the cleansing ceremony.

Be that as it may, the ceremony appears to have helped:

A cleansing ceremony dubbed Wafawafa, was held at the school on 5 March this year by the International Healers’ Association, during which the villagers say Mr Moyo was exposed after an assortment of paraphernalia associated with witchcraft was recovered from his bedroom.

A village head from the area, Mr Emmanuel Chasokela Maseko, said normalcy had returned to the school since the cleansing ceremony was held but insisted that Mr Moyo should be transferred from the school as he was a risk to the community.

So... Mr. Moyo was exposed, was he?  Okay, that's it; you need to repeat the journalism class in "Avoiding Double Entendres."

But anyway, what strikes me about all of this is that (1) the appearance of panties and the "signs of having had sex" could both be accounted for by the people in question actually having had sex, and then not wanting to admit it; and (2) the goblins seem like a convenient way to get rid of the headmaster, especially if he knew about the nighttime shenanigans and was trying to put a stop to it.  Only a supposition, but this seems more likely to me than there being a real Pack of Sex Goblins under Mr. Moyo's command.

But since the authorities obviously believe in goblins who visit at night to have their wicked way with you, it appears that poor Mr. Moyo is out of a job.

[The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781: image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So that's our excursion into the regional nature of supernatural entities.  It's a pity, really.  I'd love it if a Frost Giant showed up up at my school.  We've had the right kind of winter for it; and it might cut down on misbehavior.  "Okay, that's the third homework assignment you've missed this week.  Into the cave with the Frost Giant."

But you never get that kind of break when you need it.

Peopling the world with pyromaniac goblins

In many cases, the woo-woo view of the world seems to me to come from a sort of fantasy-land style wishful thinking.  Wouldn't it be lovely if our lives were ruled by the stars?  Isn't it a nice thought that our deceased loved ones could communicate comforting messages to us through the voice of a medium?  Wouldn't it be grand if deep down, there was a pattern, that all of the craziness and chaos we see around us actually meant something?

It seems, however, that there are (at least) two other motivations for espousing a counterfactual view of the world.  One comes from a kind of free-floating paranoia, and that's what gives rise to your conspiracy theorists, the sort of people who think that HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) caused the Japanese tsunami last year.  A third cause of woo-woo-ism, however, consists of jumping to a wild explanation because the rational, logical alternatives nearer at hand are simply too awful to contemplate.

Consider the recent goblin attacks in Zimbabwe.  (Source)

The news outlet that reported the story, ZimDiaspora, tells of the homestead inhabited by the Sithole and Muyambo families, which had been plagued by "mysterious occurrences."  Stones were thrown at family members by an unseen hand.  Dirt was put into cooking pots, ruining the meals.  And now, four buildings in the homestead have been burned to the ground, leaving the families "sleep(ing) in the open, while the few belongings they managed to salvage from the raging fire are heaped outside."

And what, pray tell, could wreak all of this havoc upon this poor family?  The answer, of course, is:  goblins.

Or a magic spell.  Something like that.  One of the household's members, 52-year-old Sarah Muyambo, said that magic was definitely a possibility, because a "traditional healer" had told her that her son, Enoch (29) had "laid his hands on some money-making magical charms and things are now backfiring."  Of course, another member of the homestead said he had seen "snake-like creatures wearing sunglasses, a suit and a pair of shoes" near the houses, so maybe it could be that.

Or, maybe not.

Let's quote another bit of the news story:  "Whenever one young male member of the family, Taso Sithole (16) entered each of the huts and as soon as he came out, that hut would unexpectedly go up in smoke and this happened on all the four structures that were burnt at the homestead."

So, what do you think is the most likely explanation here, for the tragic burning of the buildings in the homestead?

1)  Goblins did it.
2)  It was because a money-making magic charm backfired.
3)  A snake-like creature wearing shoes and sunglasses set the fires.
4)  It was a teenage boy, who amazingly enough was on the scene every time it happened.

Okay, I've been a teacher for 25 years, and I've known a lot of teenage boys -- I even helped to raise two of them.  And one thing that seems universal is that teenage boys like to set things on fire.  That a teenage boy would burn down four houses in his own homestead does seem pretty extreme, even by ordinary teenage-boy-standards -- honestly, it seems to point to a dangerous pyromania, something considerably beyond the ordinary enjoyment of watching stuff burn up.  And I suppose that on some level you can understand why Taso Sithole's family isn't all that eager to consider this possibility.  But seriously -- goblins?  Snakes wearing shoes?  Magic spells?

It can't be easy to realize that someone in your family is deranged.  But it seems like, just for safety's sake, it is better to confront the painful truth than it is to make stuff up, peopling the world with pyromaniac goblins so that you don't have to face reality.  To quote Carl Sagan:  "Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."