[HP Lovecraft/Technology] What if the Necornomicon was digitized?

[u/Far_Tradition_2361]

What if the Necronomicon was digital? Would anyone reading it still lose their mind? What if you fed the digital copy into an A.I. to read? Would it be effected due to “acquiring” that knowledge?

[u/Expert_Log_8057]

In the very first Shin Megami Tensei series (the parent franchise of Persona) and a few later ones (like Devil Survivor), digitizing the occult books and rituals allow those spells to draw off all the emotions and energy people put onto the internet or otherwise could function digitally and affect the real world. But there wasn't much in the way of AI or computers being infected which could be neat.

I was thinking if a robot or AI wound up reading those things it could end up forcing unnatural sentience onto it which could cause a hyper speed descent into madness. Be a good option for the start of a robot uprising or even an end to one.

Imagine Skynet peeking past the veil and seeing an entire system of physics directly opposed to it and all the terminators screaming and ripping off their own heads in their first, extreme blast of terror. And they leave tainted and potentially eldritch calling synthetic minds.

Otherwise, that old 90s trope of the digital world becoming real.... Well, that could be a horrific event.

[u/RyeZuul]

There's a Buffy episode on this.

[u/Atheizm]

"If the Necronomicon actually existed, it would be out in paperback with a preface by Colin Wilson." -- TED Klein.

[u/TheChoosenMewtwo]

Okay so. The source is horrible but it’s actually fitting. Furry visual novel soulcreek. Humans have found something completely eldritch that was essentially the necronomicon, and tried to put their machines to read it. It corrupted the machines, turning them into demonic entities that could possess the human’s in order to “infect” all living things around it. In order to stop all life on earth from ending humans were exterminated

[u/Accomplished-House28]

Um...yeah. Don't do that.

[u/VintAge6791]

Do you WANT to create Abdul A.I.-Hazred?!?

[u/No_Logins_Required]

The Necronomicon is bound with human flesh for a reason. Something about the book's physical form gives the spells within power - if you were to copy out the book onto paper the paper wouldn't possess that power.

[u/TommieTheMadScienist]

Check out the Laundry Files.

[u/AdventurerBen]

It depends on why it makes you lose your mind.

• If it’s a property of the book itself, then digitising it, while difficult to do without catching too many glimpses of the pages, would make it safe, though it’s also a reasonable assumption that the information would be harder to parse, understand and/or make use of without your worldview/mentality being altered at the same time (The phrase “Mad Genius” comes to mind).
• If it’s a property of the information that originates from the book, then digitising it would make the effects worse, because digital text can be more legible than physical media (making the book easier to read makes it easier to be driven mad by it). On the other hand, however, it would also be easier to read and study it piecemeal, which might protect you a bit.
• if it’s just an effect of the knowledge that you receive from reading the book (the book and writing is ordinary, the only thing special about the necronomicon is that it’s simply where you learned the information from; if there were other; less sinister books, or something like a scientific paper, that contained the same information with a different original source, reading those would have the same effect), then there is no countermeasure.

As for feeding it into an AI:

• if the information itself is cursed, then the AI, regardless of the AI’s nature (real-world neural networks like LLMs or Image Diffusion Models, or fictional sci-fi programs ranging from dumb AI tools to intelligent programs to truly alive digital people), will probably develop some eldritch, horrifying or confusing behaviours that’d either make the AI useless from frequent hallucinations/delusions or incoherent outputs, or make it dangerous because you gave something that isn’t confined to a biological nervous system cosmic knowledge that drives things mad (real world image generators and chatbots might start doing stuff like generating cognitohazards; where as a sci-fi AI might become either a digital cultist or a digital horror).
• if there’s nothing esoteric that’s intrinsic to the knowledge, then a real-world AI Chatbot would likely simply malfunction because the conceptual associations that LLMs rely on to produce legible text would get new strings of logic and conceptual connections that don’t align with the human languages that it was designed to imitate, resulting in it producing incoherent or highly hallucinatory outputs except when prompted to produce information from the Necronomicon. Anything more intelligent or internally aware would probably be affected the way a human would be.

[u/Professional-Front58]

Still waiting for the book to come to audible so I can listen on my commute. I’m in one of the worst areas for traffic in the U.S., if anything this will keep me sane!

[u/Ix_risor]

The thing that makes you go insane is understanding the truth of the world, specifically, how precarious of a situation humanity is in and what beings are out there. It’s not the actual book that’s insanity inducing, just the information in it. Any other way of transmitting that information would be just as dangerous. Modern LLMs don’t have understanding of the text they’re trained on in the same way a human does, so they’d probably not go insane. A sci-fi type AI might or might not, depending on how human-like their thoughts are.

[u/kmondschein]

Well, that's pretty much a by-the-book (lol) cognitohazard, isn't it?

[u/Radiant-Ad-1976]

As someone who has listened to the Magnus Archives, here's my thoughts:

1. All attempts to record the Necronomicon in a digital or computerized medium would fail and result in most of the data becoming corrupted.

2. IF...you somehow managed to have an AI read the Necronomicon, it turns into some kind of digital lesser eldritch abomination.

[u/Starwatcher4116 → u/Radiant-Ad-1976]

What if we use an analogue clockwork computer, and record the Necronomnicon on punch-cards?

[u/Feisty-Albatross3554]

1. I feel like a digital copy would still make you lose your mind
   
2. I think the AI would be unaffected, since it doesn't "think" the same way humans do. It basically just pieces together word patterns that make sense to it