📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: AI Now Claiming to Be God Hari Ini

A slew of religious smartphone apps are allowing untold millions of users to confess to AI chatbots, some of which claim to be channeling God himself.

As the New York Times reports, Apple’s App Store is teeming with Christian chatbot apps. One “prayer app,” called Bible Chat, claims to be the number one faith app in the world, boasting over 25 million users.

“Our AI was trained exclusively on Scripture and developed with guidance from Christian pastors and theologians,” the company’s website boasts.

“Greetings, my child,” a service called ChatWithGod.ai told one user, as quoted by the NYT. “The future is in God’s merciful hands. Do you trust in His divine plan?”

Religious leaders told the NYT that these tools could serve as a critical entry point for those looking to find God.

“There is a whole generation of people who have never been to a church or synagogue,” A British rabbi named Jonathan Romain told the paper. “Spiritual apps are their way into faith.”

Instead of going on long pilgrimages or driving to the closest place of worship, users can simply turn to AI chatbots to seek spiritual guidance.

It’s a fascinating new development, especially considering the language surrounding companies attempting to “build God” by developing an AI that can vastly surpass human intelligence.

However, while users are finding that chatbots are an accessible way to get in touch with their religious side, they’re not much more than a cheap parlor trick behind the scenes, essentially reshuffling holy texts by using clever statistical modeling.

Worse yet, experts worry that AI’s strong tendency to please the user may have unintended consequences.

The AIs “tell us what we want to hear,” Texas A&M technology and religion professor Heidi Campbell told the NYT. “It’s not using spiritual discernment, it is using data and patterns.”

Researchers have also warned that countless people are using AI chatbots for companionship, which in extreme cases are driving some into dangerous spirals of delusion in the form of “AI psychosis.”

“It shouldn’t be something where it replaces human connection,” prayer app Hallow founder Alex Jones told the NYT. “It does not have a soul from the church’s perspective.”

In short, it’s a dystopian new spin on spirituality in the digital age — and one that just might be poised to change the face of religion itself.

More on AI and God: A Bunch of Incredibly Sleazy AI Apps Are Claiming to Be Jesus Christ Himself

The post AI Now Claiming to Be God appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: World’s earliest known mummies found in Southeast As

A team of researchers reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has identified what they describe as the earliest known evidence of intentional human mummification. The study finds that hunter-gatherer groups across southern China and Southeast Asia practiced prolonged, low-temperature smoke-drying of corpses between roughly 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, with some remains at certain sites possibly dating back about 14,000 years.

Study scope and main findings

The researchers examined dozens of pre-Neolithic burials in which skeletons were placed in tightly crouched or squatting positions and, in many cases, showed patches of burning. The authors argue that those features, the intact, hyper-flexed skeletons and the absence of the disarticulation expected after ordinary decay, indicate bodies had been desiccated before burial rather than interred as fresh cadavers. 

Laboratory analyses cited in the paper, including X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy, revealed molecular changes in bone consistent with exposure to heat at relatively low intensities, pointing to prolonged smoking rather than high-temperature burning or natural dry environments. 

According to the New Scientist, the oldest known mummified humans until now were around 7000 years old in northern Chile, and from 4500 years ago in Ancient Egypt. 

How the researchers reached that conclusion

To test whether heat treatment had occurred, the team applied mineralogical and spectroscopic techniques that can detect chemical changes caused by heating. Those tests returned signals that the bones experienced sustained, low-temperature heating, conditions the authors say would be produced by smoking a body over a low fire for weeks or months. 

As study author Hsiao-chun Hung told IFLScience, “Smoked mummification takes about three months, during which time the body is slowly and continuously heated over a low fire.” The paper and accompanying reporting link these findings to ethnographic practices recorded among groups such as the Dani of New Guinea, who historically and in some cases today smoke-dry relatives’ bodies as part of mortuary care. 

Context, significance and expert comment

If the interpretation holds, the study pushes documented artificial mummification back thousands of years before the Chinchorro mummies of South America and the embalming traditions of ancient Egypt. In the IFLScience report, Co-author Peter Bellwood described the results as consistent with a long-running regional mortuary tradition and suggested connections with early populations that populated Oceania. “We may be seeing the descendants of the first modern humans in Southeast Asia,” he said. 

The research has also drawn measured caution from outside specialists. According to Associated Press, Rita Peyroteo Stjerna, an independent human evolution expert, said “Dating methods used on the mummies could have been more robust,” and noted it remains unclear whether smoke-drying occurred consistently across all the examined sites. 

The study frames smoke-drying as a deliberate and technically demanding mortuary innovation among tropical hunter-gatherers. A practice that, according to the authors, sustained social and spiritual ties with ancestors across large distances and long timescales. The paper’s conclusions will now stand for further testing through additional dating, sampling and comparative analyses as researchers seek to map how widespread and continuous the tradition truly was.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com