The current burst of AI can seem both extremely weird, and smotheringly banal. Erik Davis maps an enlightened way through
“AGI and high weirdness Pixar Style”. Prompt to MidJourney, by Alternative Global
Some of us have been waiting patiently for Erik Davis, author of the classic integration between technology and spirituality titled Techgnosis, to engage with the current explosion of artificial intelligence. He’s finally done so over two recent blogs on Substack, “AI - EEEEEE!” and “The Weird and the Banal.”
Erik is one of the most accomplished writers/thinkers in this zone we know, so we encourage you to read both pieces. But we’ll post some excerpts below. They‘re mostly around Davis’s sense (articulated in his most recent book High Weirdness) that the concept of the “weird”—those uncanny and undecidable experiences that most of us have, even in the depths of our modernity—can be applied usefully to understanding the current crop of Generative AI. ]
Erik usefully lays out his main categories of weirdness:
An aesthetic mode of narrative or imagery, associated with the macabre, uncanny, or bizarre. “Weird fiction.”
An unconventional, peculiar, or even perverse social or subject position. A “weirdo.”
An ontological feature of reality, understood or experienced as anomalous or strongly counter-intuitive, but without demanding any supernatural account. “Quantum weirdness.”
Weird fiction
“There is no getting to the bottom of an AI chatbot. It is a Proteus with countless masks, a master of genre. It does not talk back to you so much as simulate the character it thinks you want to talk to. As such, our desire to expose its hidden goals and desires is more likely to recursively land us in the clutches of our own self-fulfilling narratives.
“Even asking it to provide a rational account for its statements and conclusions, which some computer scientists suggest as a necessary step in AI safety, only leads to more performed speech. Like actual oracles, which are sometimes inscrutable and wrong even for believers, these [latest AIs’] gifts and truths are the gifts and truths of a trickster. Hermes is an artistic craftsman and a messenger of the gods; and Hermes is a bullshitter and a thief.
“A myriad of concrete goods will come our way, along with reams of speech that may temporarily render the symbolic world a vast mediocrity, the banal reverse of the weird, as everything under the sun races to the lowest common denominator. In some ways AIs may make things really boring and flat, like getting ferried home alone in a Waymo [self-driving taxi operating in San Franscisco] rather than chatting with the Eritrean guy about the food he misses from home.
“But attempts at discovering the deeper motives of AI, or even trying to imaginatively grasp the hyper-object they are, may keep wrapping us up in the tentacles of weird fiction — the only genre that blends the ancient sorceries of summoning with the alien voids of science fiction, and which can display the keenest sensitivity to the strange and sometimes dreadful agency of nonhuman beings.”
Weirdos
“Perhaps the most revealing bit in Sam Altman’s post [Altman is the founder and director of Open AI, one of the leading companies in the new wave of AI services- ed] is a footnote found on his blog but not on Medium:
I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation. I can feel the changes in my own life — I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends’ young children don’t even know that’s something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often, instead chasing the dual dopamine hits of likes and outrage.
What strikes me most about this sad admission is its passivity. Where is that heroic Silicon Valley solutionism when you need it? Altman is describing a major feature of our collective crisis, as consciousness is looped into arresting patterns of poison, addiction, attention deficit, manipulation, rage, and misery.
“But rather than possible steps toward healing or mitigation, let alone older discourses of human augmentation or cyborg mutualism, we hear a fatalistic submission to the ADHD click-bait demon. ‘Hacking’ here is no longer something humans do to carve a space of escape or play out of machines designed for other purposes; hacking is something deployed against our own minds.
“Altman has decided that there is no real rapprochement possible between the AI alien and the human mind and heart, and that the AI alien inevitably wins. I have been reading science fiction, nihilist philosophy, evolutionary psychology, and media studies for decades, so I am not surprised by any of this. But here this fatalism reminds me of the etymological root of weirdness: the Anglo-Saxon word Wyrd, which means fate or destiny.
“Macbeth’s grim fate after encountering the Wyrd Sisters in Shakespeare’s play is a reminder of how the problems of weirdness are often problems of agency, of will and its seductive or malevolent puppet-masters. Sometimes AI does seem like the Doom of modernity. But even the Beowulf poet observed: “Wyrd often saves an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good.”
“Maybe Altman’s just more steely-eyed than I. But he may simply have lost heart along with his attention span. Bon courage Sam! How sad to be on top of your game only to turn around and meekly be assimilated.”
ONto-weirdness
“…One of the paradoxes of these systems is that while it is not hard to rationally understand their operating principles, the products of those operations are unpredictable, even un-analyzable. One of the genuinely anomalous things about them is that when they do spit out anomalies, the humans that built them don’t even pretend that they can explain all the mechanisms that led to those anomalies. There are too many unknown unknowns.
“That’s a new one, folks, a double-order anomaly. You can call it “emergence” if you want, but that term sounds like a band-aid for WTF to me.
“Other sorts of anomalies, in a different sense of the term, will also greet us if and when today’s accelerating AIs and their monster spawn are unleashed into the human world at large, driven by a winner-take-all capitalist game already inimical in so many ways to human flourishing, sense-making, and even sanity.
“It seems that the symbolic world will grow infested with smarter-than-us bots; technological agents will simulate features of the human we took to be unique to us; disinformation and scams will go through the roof; and even our cherished expressive arts will be invaded by statistical parrots that dominate the charts and outfox the literati.
“What Niall Ferguson calls “inhuman intelligence” will also do all sorts of stuff we can’t even imagine. A huge swath of the social, institutional, and technological interactions we now take (barely) for granted will jump the predictive track, intensifying the disorientation, disruption, and reality distortion that have already been mounting over the last twenty odd years.
“These changes suggest that we might want to dust off a now quaint term minted in the late 1990s. “Global weirding” was originally offered as a spicier and slightly tongue-in-cheek replacement for “global warming,” which itself did not adequately reflect the full-spectrum turbulence that, as we now know too well, also involves arctic vortexes and chilly atmospheric rivers. Compared to today’s wonky term “climate change,” global weirding better marks our felt sense of endless strange weather and looming if undetermined threat.
“But now we get to amplify that animal dread with an alien nerd-djinn’s careful-what-you-wish-for refashioning of computation, symbolic communication, R&D, security, entertainment, and surveillance capitalism. Maybe, just maybe, the machines can actually help with the polycrisis, but even then it’s going to be a long strange trip without the good graces of offering a respite.”
***
All the preceding from “AI - EEEEEE!”. Erik’s response to the reaction to his first essay, “The Weird and the Banal”, digs into what AI’s behaviour reveals about not just the weird, but its antithesis, the banal:
“As many critics have pointed out, many of the AI systems already influencing society, such as the statistical models informing a lot of modern policing, are not being weird at all. They are rather doing the “same as it ever was” dance: a repetition of assumptions based on limited training data whose biases are naturalized through that very repetition. Far from swerving away from a norm, these systems make the future by conservatively iterating the past.
“Even the apparent creativity of LLMs relies on the novel shuffling of a gargantuan deck of cards that already exists (much of which belongs to other people, but that is another question). The extraordinarily rapid adaption of ChatGPT to a wide variety of tasks, from job applications to undergrad papers to movie scripts, may unsettle business as usual, but it threatens to drown us all in a blizzard of mediocre approximations of other mediocrities — like all those legions of drivers discovering the secret back alleys revealed by Waze [a GPS navigation service]. The algos aren’t just good at factoring primes; they may also excel at unearthing ever lower lowest common denominators…
“….Weird is wild, with a built-in autonomy factor, but it can also be faked or aped. Is AI actually wild, or is the enchanted emergence just another version of the ideology that naturalizes technology to disguse its social origins and what Heidegger recognized as its pitiless enframing of resources?
“Antero Alli [an artist friend of Davis’s] recognizes that weirdness is ‘a relative condition,’ not so much a characteristic of the thing itself but ‘the energy you feel, sense, or imagine coming at you from anything or anybody currently beyond your control and comprehension.’ Weirdness is partly in the eye of the beholder, then, which means that knowledge and routinization change the vibe. Cthulhu goes plushy.
“Alli also reminds us, however, that weirdness is a feature of objective reality, or at least the picture that physics paints of said reality. In other words, the weird will not be vaporized anytime soon, especially as we dive ever more deeply into the quantum future. But Alli’s most intriguing suggestion is that weirdness may be identified with potential itself: the not-yet, the what-if, the excluded middle, the ‘nobody’ that we really are.
“The real question, then, is whether AI will further expand the field of potential for anything other than capital. Will it help maintain the openness that characterizes the human (and some of its posthuman possibilities)? Or will it iteratively stitch up that weirdly sacred nebulosity, collapsing the open field into a vanishing point of no return?”
More from Erik Davis’s Burning Shore here