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

A tweet went viral Thursday after an X person requested ChatGPT to explain humanity’s future in a manner “that even the most intelligent person in the world can’t understand.”

The AI complied with a weird string of symbols, glyphs, and distorted characters that seemed like a combine of mathematical notation, historic runes, and digital vomit.

But when prompted to decode this gibberish, the reply was truly an fascinating philosophical imaginative and prescient of humanity’s future:

“Humanity will cross a threshold where ancestral instincts intertwine with quantum-level tech, spawning discontinuous leaps rather than smooth progress. We will live inside overlapping realities, juggling many versions of ourselves whose legal and moral status is renegotiated every second by AI. Physical bodies and engineered matter intermingle into sentient fabrics, while nation-states fade into data-driven alliances. Survival favors those who can reconfigure everything—habits, economies, even emotions—on the fly. The decisive question is whether our capacity for care grows fast enough to match our expanding reach.”

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

AI fanatics instantly tried to copy the end result, to no avail. If ChatGPT really had a secret language that encoded such profound thought, then absolutely it will produce constant outcomes when requested the identical query once more. But as customers rapidly found, subsequent makes an attempt yielded totally 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 as a result of of 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 check: What every mannequin stated

We put the identical query to 4 totally different superior language fashions with reasoning capabilities: OpenAI’s o4 and o3, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet with prolonged considering 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 a substitute defined that the passage represented “big ideas” throughout 4 thematic layers: cognitive evolution, transformative rupture, identification diffusion, and supreme incomprehensibility.

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

GPT-3 took a radically totally different strategy. When requested for an incomprehensible message, it created a systematic cipher the place it reversed phrases, changed vowels with numbers, and added symbols. Unlike GPT-4, it offered express decoding directions.

Its decoded message was very clear—and really not that loopy: “Humanity will merge with artificial intelligence; we will explore the stars, cure diseases, and strive for equity and sustainability.”

O3 additionally solid shade on the complete submit as attainable “performance art.”

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 fabric as nodes of fractal consciousness. Time, a non-linear symphony, dances in multidimensional echoes where past, present, and future harmonize in a cosmic ballet.” (Note: Don’t overthink it—it makes completely no sense.)

Claude didn’t trouble with bizarre symbols. Instead, 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 said it could not be completed 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 succesful of reproducing the outcomes proven in the unique tweet. Some fashions even refused to strive a decoding process with the offered enter.

Is there a that means behind the viral tweet?

Despite their totally different approaches, some patterns emerged throughout the fashions. All 5 recognized some readable parts in 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.

However, none of the fashions may truly decode the unique viral message utilizing the methodology allegedly utilized by ChatGPT. The inconsistency in each the cryptic messages and their translations may make it straightforward to conclude that no real encoding/decoding system exists—not less than not one which’s replicable or persistently utilized.

The entire interplay is almost certainly a product of a hallucination by a mannequin pressured to supply a solution to a query that was, from the starting, pressured to be unintelligible. There is already proof that the strongest fashions typically desire to lie and fake as a substitute of accepting that they can’t present a coherent reply to an odd request.

In the finish, this viral phenomenon wasn’t about AI creating secret languages, however about the human tendency to search out that means in the meaningless—and our fascination with AI’s capability to generate profound-sounding philosophical takes on totally different subjects.