Under the Sun
If you believe, as I do, that “there is no new thing under the sun,” then you will find it very difficult to write a biweekly column. What is worth writing has already been written; what is not worth writing will probably be written by ChatGPT in the next five months. Still, you try.
I have been fascinated by the fawning adoration of ChatGPT in and around LinkedIn and Twitter these last few weeks, and if Marc Andreessen can talk endlessly about the same subject, so can I. Logging into the socials for work, I feel like a Victorian era journalist stumbling upon a primitive village in the midst of a dark, religious ceremony, with only his faith and rifle to protect him. It is astonishing to watch human beings subjugate themselves to a manmade idol, bringing it offerings of their very own thought (“prompts,” in the native dialect); only this idol is a clever mechanism, and actually digests these offerings through some inner mechanical workings before regurgitating them alongside previous sacrifices, which causes the natives to whoop nightmarishly and post on social media.
In such a world, it seems inevitable that there be a new sort of writer, one who dangles ideas in front of the machine which has devoured so many: in fact, it is already exists, according to the Washington Post (“Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required”). The way one expertly talks to the latest wonder from Silicon Valley strikes me as worrisome: a bit abusive — telling the model what it’s bad at, to start out with, then adopting a softer tone — as well as a bit of gaslighting — denying things you said to get it to think differently and getting it to believe certain ideas of yours were, in fact, its own. Certain humorists — I am not one! — would thus conclude Silicon Valley engineers have created an AI to whom they can talk like they wish they could talk to their previous romantic partners. My take is that we seem already to be anthropomorphizing in all the wrong ways; none of the “she’s a good ship” you saw from a loving Scotty in the early Star Trek, more a sort of domineering manipulation better suited for a boxed-up genie or a simple-minded brute. Something about the digital interface, versus a mechanical interface, makes this easier. The Valley seems to make ChatGPT an other, but it is a lesser other.
There are other technologies, purely intellectual rather than mechanical (ways of thinking versus ways of doing) that you’d think we could draw a parallel to: alphabetization, concordances and indexes, novels. Yet we don’t anthropomorphize these orderings of our thoughts, which is in essence what ChatGPT is. It would be absurd to speak of controlling any of these any more than it would be to feel controlled by them. ChatGPT is the most salient example of the gray area occupied by purely digital things. These things are superior to humans for their swiftness in thinking and recollection, which was long the only area humans could reliably claim superiority over beasts, forces of nature and our own mechanical forces. And yet digital things are abusive or abusable depending on how well you understand them, which is increasingly hard, not only for their creators, but even for those getting paid to wrangle them. We are better than them, but, measuring all the wrong things, we increasingly do not know why. It is a quasi-religious setting, with a laity and priesthood: see the Church of Google and ChatGPT’s much-considered fabrication of Bible-esque verses.
None of this matters, probably, to anyone but me. What matters is that ChatGPT speaks eternally, on any subject, and this makes it the dream of any capitalist or dictator who has had to work with an artist and found that, unlike a commodity, thought cannot be reliably manufactured. Now, it can — at least, an ersatz version, and this is good for most use cases. As Riley Goodside, the “prompt engineer” quoted in the Washington Post piece says: "“[The AI] has no grounding in reality … but it has this understanding: All tasks can be completed. All questions can be answered. There’s always something to say … [the trick is] constructing for it a premise, a story that can only be completed in one way.”
Indeed. And “A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”
Perhaps ChatGPT knows. It has read Ecclesiastes, after all.
“The Wicker Man of the Druids,” A Tour in Wales, Thomas Pennant
