Did AI Just Give a Wild Preview of What the Future of Humanity Will Look Like?

A tweet went viral Thursday after an X consumer requested ChatGPT to explain humanity’s future in a method “that even probably the most clever individual on this planet cannot perceive.”

The AI complied with a weird string of symbols, glyphs, and distorted characters that appeared like a mixture of mathematical notation, historical runes, and digital vomit.

However when prompted to decode this gibberish, the reply was truly an attention-grabbing philosophical imaginative and prescient of humanity’s future:

“Humanity will cross a threshold the place ancestral instincts intertwine with quantum-level tech, spawning discontinuous leaps fairly than clean progress. We are going to reside inside overlapping realities, juggling many variations of ourselves whose authorized and ethical standing is renegotiated each second by AI. Bodily our bodies and engineered matter intermingle into sentient materials, whereas nation-states fade into data-driven alliances. Survival favors those that can reconfigure every part—habits, economies, even feelings—on the fly. The decisive query is whether or not our capability for care grows quick sufficient to match our increasing attain.”

Had ChatGPT developed a secret language that solely it might perceive? Was this a glimpse into how AI fashions truly “assume” behind the scenes? Or was this simply one other instance of AI’s penchant for hallucination and confabulation—creating which means the place none exists?

AI lovers instantly tried to duplicate the consequence, to no avail. If ChatGPT really had a secret language that encoded such profound thought, then certainly it will produce constant outcomes when requested the identical query once more. However as customers rapidly found, subsequent makes an attempt yielded completely different gibberish and wildly divergent “translations.”

What occurred right here? Did ChatGPT merely generate random symbols, then create an equally random “translation” that solely appeared significant due to our human tendency to hunt patterns and significance?

We determined to check a number of AI fashions with the identical immediate and see if there was any consistency of their responses or decoding strategies.

The AI babel take a look at: What every mannequin stated

We put the identical query to 4 completely different superior language fashions with reasoning capabilities: OpenAI’s o4 and o3, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet with prolonged pondering enabled, and xAI’s Grok-3 in prolonged thought mode.

GPT-4 initially generated its personal cryptic message crammed with Greek letters, mathematical symbols, and distorted textual content. When requested to decode it, the mannequin did not declare to translate particular symbols, however as an alternative defined that the passage represented “large concepts” throughout 4 thematic layers: cognitive evolution, transformative rupture, identification diffusion, and supreme incomprehensibility.

Its decoded message described humanity evolving right into a “universe-spanning consciousness,” the place people would dissolve right into a “time-woven community.” Social and bodily buildings would fracture, creating new “multi-dimensional areas” with societies current as “interlocking, echoing patterns.”

GPT-3 took a radically completely different strategy. When requested for an incomprehensible message, it created a scientific cipher the place it reversed phrases, changed vowels with numbers, and added symbols. Not like GPT-4, it supplied express decoding directions.

Its decoded message was very clear—and truly not that loopy: “Humanity will merge with synthetic intelligence; we’ll discover the celebs, treatment illnesses, and attempt for fairness and sustainability.”

O3 additionally forged shade on all the put up as potential “efficiency artwork.”

Grok’s preliminary response was a bunch of summary philosophical language about “fractal consciousness” and “nonlinear time.” Our favourite line? “Humanity transcends the corporeal, weaving into the quantum material as nodes of fractal consciousness. Time, a non-linear symphony, dances in multidimensional echoes the place previous, current, and future harmonize in a cosmic ballet.” (Observe: Don’t overthink it—it makes completely no sense.)

Claude didn’t hassle with bizarre symbols. As a substitute, it generated a response heavy on tutorial jargon, that includes phrases like “chronosynclastic infundibulum” and “techno-social morphogenesis.” When requested to decode the viral tweet’s symbols, Claude initially acknowledged it could not be achieved as a result of the textual content did not comply with any customary encoding system.

When requested to decode the unique message, utilizing the methodology shared by SmokeAwayyy, no AI mannequin was able to reproducing the outcomes proven within the authentic tweet. Some fashions even refused to strive a decoding activity with the supplied enter.

Is there a which means behind the viral tweet?

Regardless of their completely different approaches, some patterns emerged throughout the fashions. All 5 recognized some readable parts within the viral tweet’s symbols, significantly phrases like “whisper,” “quantum bridges,” and references to a “sphinx.” The fashions additionally discovered themes associated to quantum physics, multidimensionality, and transhumanism.

Nevertheless, not one of the fashions might truly decode the unique viral message utilizing the tactic allegedly utilized by ChatGPT. The inconsistency in each the cryptic messages and their translations might make it straightforward to conclude that no real encoding/decoding system exists—at the least not one which’s replicable or persistently utilized.

The entire interplay is more than likely a product of a hallucination by a mannequin compelled to offer a solution to a query that was, from the start, compelled to be unintelligible. There may be already proof that probably the most highly effective fashions usually favor to lie and fake as an alternative of accepting that they can’t present a coherent reply to an odd request.

Ultimately, this viral phenomenon wasn’t about AI creating secret languages, however concerning the human tendency to seek out which means within the meaningless—and our fascination with AI’s capability to generate profound-sounding philosophical takes on completely different matters.