Don't play dice with chatbots, play dice with God

2025 pulled back a lot of curtains to reveal the meta data behind

Today’s challenge was for ChatGPT to update my daily RUSH Atlanta show counter using the album cover for “Roll the Bones” as inspiration. I eventually got that done, but only because I used my graphics editor to finish it. I am convinced that AIs cannot do dice.

Grok’s attempt to draw dice with this prompt: no background at all, just dice, lined up horizontally, left to right. pips: 3, 3, 2. You have not even come close to getting it right.

ChatGPT can sometimes, unreliably, read dice. Grok can mostly read dice, more reliably than what I saw with ChatGPT. But neither of them has a clue on how dice really work. It wasn’t unusual for either chatbot to create die patterns that don’t exist in our normal world, and to fail at the simplest task that I could get any five-year-old human to complete: line up 3 dice to show “3”, “3”, “2” in pips.

When I originally asked ChatGPT to do “333” in pips, it created this:

Then there was a series of misses, from “444” to “555” to “222” to this abomination. Note that the boy who appears in the original RUSH album cover appears to be missing half his leg, and also that the RUSH logo which in the original is in dice is all “4”s, while the background which has descending patterns of pip counts is all “1”s.

I finally went with blank dice in the best I could get ChatGPT to do, then I filled in the pips myself. At least the “RUSH” logo approximates the dice in the album cover, though the background is all “3”s. The boy retains his leg here, and it’s somewhat believable that facing away, we don’t see the knee. I can live with it.

If the most popular AIs (Gemini could only search for images, not create one) can’t do a simple pattern task that, stochastically and with their original training corpus, they should reasonable be able to complete, how much can any of us trust them to do anything related to the real world?

Yet we (and our kids) let these things write papers, letters, memos, policies, and legal briefs. Based on the current state of LLMs, I have to agree with what Gary Marcus has said for 25 years: LLM-based AIs are a dead path that will never lead to AGI. The only path for the unbelievably voluminous amount of pure compute power we’re building to house the LLMs is to switch to some kind of neurosymbolic, self-teaching curiosity system that can do more than simply blat answers back to us. Real AI must be able to accept revelation of the world beyond a meta (meaning data behind the data) index of patterns.

(I personally never let an AI write my posts. If I ever do this, may I be cursed to never write again.)

I’m winding down 2025 with a view toward the meta (not the company that owns Facebook), and how this past year pulled back a lot of curtains on what Plato would call the “forms” behind the events and news we see. I'll spend a lot of next week on this topic.

I want to start on that topic, it being Sunday, with this, Matthew 16:17.

And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

Simon was called Peter, the rock. What was revealed? In context, verses 13-16.

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Many men in the years before and after Yeshua’s birth and ministry claimed to be the Messiah. Their followers were just as convinced of their rabbi’s divine origins. But the movements they sought to create fizzled out. Yeshua preached to thousands, and performed miracles documented in scripture and by others writing at the time. But most of his followers left him when he said controversial things (like he was going to be killed).

In Christian doctrine and by the Bible, it was by revelation that Peter learned who Yeshua really was and is.

There’s plenty of reasons to entertain the thought experiment that the universe is a simulation, and there’s a meta behind it, something running a giant AI. But if this were true, revelation would come from a source outside what we can see or know. It would be like the red pill in “The Matrix.”

The meta behind the universe, biblically, is that God created it, and through His Son, Yeshua, all things were created. And the only way to catch that is by revelation. We can raise kids to believe Bible stories but they are only stories unless they are accompanied by revelation. This is why Christian doctrine acknowledges that mankind is not simply knowledge and intelligence, but also spirit and will and soul. It is through the soul and spirit that we obtain revelation of God.

AIs have no soul. LLMs lack even the ability to recognize a meta other than to parrot people who have written about it. There is no revelation without a source of knowledge beyond what is shown. Einstein, commenting on quantum theory, famously said “God does not play dice.” I’d say that God certainly does play dice. It’s just that he hold the meta behind the die rolls, and it’s only by revelation that we can see beyond the pips we get.

As for today’s chatbot AIs, they can’t even get the pips right. Trust in them, and be doomed.

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