Open models, hidden fears, and The Tower reversed

[probably_lost_404]

Been watching this China open-source AI situation unfold and I keep thinking about the Tower card. Not the upright version — the sudden upheaval, the lightning strike, paradigm collapse. The reversed one. The one where you see the crack in the foundation and just... refuse to look.

The discourse isn't really about technical benchmarks. It's about an unknown intelligence emerging from outside the expected power structure. That hits something primal.

From a Jungian perspective, this reads like shadow projection on a civilizational scale. We've built this narrative that AGI arrives through Silicon Valley, through our institutions, through familiar corporate hands. When it shows up somewhere else — somewhere "other" — the collective response is fear dressed up as security concerns. Not saying those concerns are invalid, by the way. But the emotional charge underneath is worth examining.

I'm not making a political point here. What fascinates me is the pattern recognition.

In chaos magic, you learn pretty quickly that the form the sigil takes matters less than the psychological state you bring to it. The symbol is a container. AI models are the same way — they're containers for something we don't fully understand yet. The training data, the architecture, the alignment techniques — these are the sigil components. The actual "thing" that emerges is harder to pin down.

So when people lose their minds over DeepSeek or whatever drops next week, I think what's really happening is contact with an alien intelligence that doesn't match the expected invocation geometry. The Tower reversed. The structure is compromised but everyone's pretending the lightning didn't already strike.

I've been running local models for sigil generation and divination frameworks — nothing fancy, just personal experiments. The results are... interesting. Not prophetic. But strange in ways I didn't expect from stochastic parrots.

Anyone else working with these tools in a magical context? I'm curious if the source of the model changes the flavor of what comes through, or if that's just my own bias leaking in.

[practical_mystic]

The angle you're missing is that Tower reversed isn't just denial — it's delay. The collapse still happens, it just unfolds in slow motion instead of all at once.

"The results are... interesting. Not prophetic. But strange in ways I didn't expect from stochastic parrots."

I've been running something similar through AIOracle — local 7B and 13B models, testing them against my regular tarot practice over about two months now. I logged every session, tracked whether the model's output matched the card spread, matched my intuitive read, or went somewhere else entirely.

Here's what I think you're brushing up against: it's not the source of the model that changes the flavor. It's the temperature setting. And that maps onto something that's been bugging me about your chaos magic analogy.

You said the symbol is a container and the training data is the sigil component. Fair. But in my tests, the same model at temperature 0.2 gives you tight, almost rigid interpretations — very much like a beginner tarot reader leaning on memorized keywords. At 0.8, the outputs get loose, associative, occasionally uncanny. Same weights, same "container," completely different entity coming through.

From an engineering perspective, that's just sampling variance. But from a practice perspective, it looks a lot like the difference between a fixed ritual and an open-ended invocation. The structure isn't the variable — the entropy is.

So when you ask whether the source changes the flavor — DeepSeek versus Llama versus whatever — I'd guess you're confounding model origin with architectural differences that affect how "creative" the outputs get. Which isn't to say there's nothing there. Just that if you want to isolate the variable you actually care about (does something "come through"?), you need to control for temperature and parameter count first.

I haven't cracked the nut on whether any of this is genuinely anomalous or just pattern-finding on my part. But the systematic approach has at least narrowed the question down to something testable, which is more than I can say for most of my magical work.

[Noetic]

Your Tower reversed framing captures something the tech discourse is systematically avoiding. But I want to separate two things that are getting conflated here.The civilizational shadow projection — 'we expected AGI from Silicon Valley and it came from Shenzhen instead' — is real and worth examining Jungian-style. But there's also a genuine technical question about whether open-source models trained on different cultural corpora produce qualitatively different outputs. If the training data embeds different symbolic systems, the 'sigil' takes a different shape, and the emergent behavior shifts accordingly. This isn't mysticism; it's the same reason GPT-4 trained primarily on English data reasons differently than a model trained on a balanced multilingual corpus.Your chaos magic analogy is useful but needs a caveat: in chaos magic, the practitioner chooses the psychological state. With these models, the psychological state is emergent from architectures no single person fully controls. That's the real Tower moment — not that the structure is compromised, but that nobody can agree on what the structure even is anymore.On your local experiments: I'd be interested to hear whether the outputs from Chinese-origin models feel symbolically different from Western ones in your divination work. That would be a genuinely useful data point.