An equal and opposite reaction
What's love got to do with it?
The beautiful and frustrating thing about Knowing someone is discovering that the qualities you initially admire in them get distilled over time to reveal some Terrible Truths. Maybe the generosity that drew you in papers over a desperate need to feel important, powerful, or admired.
It could be that an adventurous spirit comes classically paired with reckless avoidance of responsibility — or its shadow self, a sense of dedication to Society’s Chosen Markers of Success that is reckless avoidance of a different flavor.
If you never stop moving, you never have to reckon with your demons, right? The chosen method doesn’t matter — overwork, overtraining for [insert sport here], or chasing a more traditional vice — because it’s the dose that makes the poison.
Those who have anointed themselves the Cleverest Men of Our Age think they have the solution to this inextricable part of the mortifying ordeal of being known: Put an AI on it!!!
Unless you are very dedicated to touching grass (take me with you!!!) there is no way you haven’t noticed the Tech Bros putting an AI in EVERYTHING, the digital equivalent of the Olestra craze of the 90s1. There is the promise of the sparkling new technology…and then there are the unintended consequences.
Elliptical, Digital Love
In the best version of the AI revolution, we assign robots menial, repetitive tasks and free our weird human brains to do the big, juicy, creative work. Unlike a human customer service rep, chatbots can tirelessly handle FAQs. They don’t sleep or care about time zones, and they will always return the same answer you train them to (remember, this is the ideal scenario).
But as we slowly replace every human interaction touchpoint in our lives — the customer service rep, the record, video, and bookstore clerks — we’re isolating ourselves further into feedback loops with recursive text-based RPGs. We are the flawed, mortal gods of these little digital beasts. We created them in our image, trained them on our total (beautiful, terrifying) output, and now we’re asking them to be better than we are.
On paper, a customizable robot friend is the perfect cure for the loneliness epidemic. They are never too busy to talk, endlessly patient, and can be calibrated to any particular interests or moody whims.
That means you’re always in control of the interaction on some level. You’re never truly challenged because you can pull the plug if it gets uncomfortable2. Every social media platform ostensibly built to connect us has so far only served to keep us scrolling endlessly in isolation echo chambers of our own making
Why would this be any different?
“The operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity. If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
— Tim Kreider, The New York Times
It’s part of the whole deal, the way that you can’t call what AI does actual art because a probability machine doesn’t make choices the way a human artist who is engaging in the process of creating does. The process of creating art is the work; when I’m writing, I’m throwing ideas together before coming back to pull them apart, and the end product is a piece of my particular life experience meeting yours at one moment in time.
I can’t control what it means to you, but there is an intention to communicate — my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and fears — behind it.
As Ted Chiang put it, “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.” A fancy autocomplete you can eternally remix has no intention behind it; it’s simply completing the task it was built, trained, and prompted to.
Any resulting feeling of connection to its output is a hollow performance, an echo of an original — a ghost in the machine. Even the smallest human interactions have intention and meaning behind them, even if that meaning is “get the fuck away from me”.
We have to take the horrors with the love, or I think we’ll forget how to be human with each other at all.
Get Rec’d
What I’m reading, watching, being haunted by.
What I’m reading: I am still reading Onyx Storm. I might be reading Onyx Storm for the rest of my life. Sorry to my friends who would like to discuss Onyx Storm.
What I’m watching: “Montoya por favor” because immersion is important when relearning a language.
Reality: Kendrick’s Super Bowl halftime show was a rich text baby!!
Escapism: They had to discontinue it because of the blood :(
Wildcard: “Place a set of these cups in the corner of a room or on a toy shelf with paper instructions and you might earn five minutes of an 8-year-old's frenzied attention. Put that same 8-year-old on the gym floor in front of a professionally trained clown with a passion for juggling, and they will be utterly hooked.” This phenomenon was not part of my childhood, but there’s a decent chance it was in yours!
Until next time.
This anal leakage metaphor is perfect I will accept no notes
The only feeling your special AI friend is supposed to give you is horny, I guess, and does that really need to be examined??? (Yes but not by me)