Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

Distantly like the story about Rationalists where some went from referencing "demons" to believing the occult is real.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076

Nous Research already trained an occult model: https://x.com/Teknium1/status/1710505270043189523

Honestly you can't get much out of GPT-666* except the most boilerplate sigils, and then you run the risk of cross-imbuement and well, now you got demons. Do you want demons? Because that's how you get demons.

You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode

I can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.

I hope it was trained on Army of Darkness and can never actually say the words.

The Laundry and the Black Chamber want to know your location.

1600 of these had already been uploaded back in 2018.

All our AIs are already trained on these

https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...

"AI trained on alchemy books successfully invokes demons"

Half of the occult books are talking about magic and irrelevant stuff. The other half is philosophy and spirituality hidden behind materialistic concepts (think Freemasons for example).

All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.

Check out https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*.

* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...

I thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?

The SHWEP (Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast) is also great for getting into the esoteric from an academic bent, Highly recommended for those with the stomach to deep dive into obscure primary sources

https://shwep.net/

IMHO, the occult is just pre-modern social psychology and propaganda. How to get people to join your religion and fight, do bad stuff, and die for you is really old technology. Before modern psychology "Spellcasting" was saying something to someone for the effect it would have on them to manipulate their psychology to get them to do the thing you wanted them to do. It was a sort of pre-modern NLP. Christians and people of other Abrahamic faiths co-existed with and did not like these guys and the feeling was generally mutual.

Francis Yates is also a fun introduction to the history of hermeticism and alchemy through a historian's perspective, and how it contributed to the creation of science.