I’ve tried to avoid writing about generative AI—with some success—but it’s more or less impossible not to read about it. I make no claim to comprehensiveness, but there are several essays I’ve found interesting, clever, or thought-provoking.
Two were written by Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, the first in collaboration with the CMU statistician, Cosma Shalizi. It explores the trope of the Large Language Model (LLM) as shoggoth—which naturally tempts the Lovecraft fan in me—but it looks back to the Industrial Revolution:
That was when we saw the first “vast, inhuman distributed systems of information processing” which had no human-like “agenda” or “purpose,” but instead “an implacable drive ... to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their spheres.” Those systems were the “self-regulating market” and “bureaucracy.”
LLMs are not the first shoggoths, then, nor are they likely to rise up and take over:
Instead, they are another vast inhuman engine of information processing that takes our human knowledge and interactions and presents them back to us in what Lovecraft would call a “cosmic” form.
A sequel explores the cognitive science of anthropomorphism: a conjectured explanation for our tendency to over-attribute intelligence to machines.
But the most entertaining take on the rise of the LLM is by the consummate essayist Brian Phillips at The Ringer. There are jokes:
On the one side were techno-optimists who foresaw a utopian future. AI would eliminate workplace drudgery, diagnose diseases more effectively than doctors could, and save humanity from one of its most loathed burdens: paying writers for anything, ever.
But the basic point is that generative AI is giving big tech what it hasn’t had for years: something new, exciting, unpredictable—regardless of ethical concerns:
Generative AI wasn’t invented in 2023, but 2023 was the year it became a hit. From the standpoint of Silicon Valley’s idea of itself, it probably matters less whether the technology is profitable yet (it almost certainly isn’t) and more that it’s everywhere. It’s the big, hot thing. Tech companies might have been going through a painful contraction, they might have spent the year laying off tens of thousands of workers, but they are—in their view—once again writing the script for the future. If that script happened to have been stolen from thousands of human artists and writers, well, check your dataset for a sentence about what you can’t avoid when making an omelet.
Phillips, too, notes our tendency to humanize ChatGPT, but adds an irony: its confabulations and mistakes only make it seem more human:
We see it as having a human personality, and we describe it, inanely, in those terms. (Within the AI industry, the word for what a bot does when it responds to a query with false statements is “hallucination.”) And what’s one of the signal attributes of human consciousness? Its unreliability. We forget stuff. We misunderstand. We make mistakes. So when ChatGPT gets its facts wrong, our brains don’t interpret this as the sign of a nonfunctional piece of computer code; to our brains, already busily anthropomorphizing our fun robot chatting friend, the errors make ChatGPT seem more like an actual person.
What remains to be written—at least I haven’t read it—is the definitive essay on why it’s an error to attribute mental states to artifacts like ChatGPT, an essay that goes beyond snark—”it’s nothing more than predictive text on steroids”—to make good on the premise that LLMs work with uninterpreted symbols, no more intelligent than a search engine, that they have no basis for primary intentionality, the capacity to think about things in the world that the words they manipulate represent.
BONUS CONTENT: Ben Lerner on Ed Atkins, digital art, and empathy in the NYRB.
The cosmic perspective is supposed to provide clarity about the human condition. LLMs are not the perspective shift we’re looking for. “Cosmic” is probably not the best word to describe the likely impact of generative AI on human self-understanding. But you’re right to bring sci-fi and H.P. Lovecraft into the conversation, Kieran,“astounding” just might be the word.