A new phármakon
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| Infringement_01| 29th May, 2024 |
Couldn’t resist this one. The mush-up preproduced by the magazine was so terrible, that I could tell straightaway that it had undergone ChatGpt a few times. A very typical ‘fm radio’ content in Stephen Hawkins voice with loads of Wiki thrown in it. Today as I was digging Pills as I often do, I found their hilarious accounts of LLM blues. I am posting the link below this article. Featured episode is from Tube about two years ago. Last quarter of it gets real. Love this bunch dearly.
A New Pharmakon
Chat GPT is dumb-puppet at the best, unless you are someone who explains his two divorces to scam callers and often follows up with them on a regular basis. But Chat GPT is more convenient as the ‘virtual other’, far less annoying than the other “the other”. My idea of beating the machine is; to acknowledge the machine, write about it and let it steal. A few hundred years from now, All the shit-pile Chat GPT would have compiled would be nothing but its own story written by someone who didn’t have better things to do. Gotcha beep-beep!
Then I thought about not having seen people I care about in years, yet hear their voices on my cell phone everyday as if coming from my head.
It came with a blur but it came long ago. As I lay here on my couch recording my little Zettlekasten notes, a little green eyed microwave blinked at me as if I might share a week old pizza slice with him. After sharing the morsel like a good Christian, I decided to spend some quality time with my good friend ChatGpt. Its sales-pitch reminds me of times when my son was four and we were always caught-up in a parent-child positive feedback loop. Both parties are vulnerable after all. The worst thing one can do is to coerce a dismissive response from ChatGpt or a four year old because that would be over-compensation. So we two are just sitting there smiling like fools. “Here’s some noise coming your way bruv”.
It feels like burning from both ends, I typed in ChatGPT Prompt. “Would your kind have that feeling? Then a capacity for something akin to self-sabotage, like having a societal contract but also to imagine a world in which absolute pleasure isn’t external to the living”, I asked and pressed enter to declare my state of mental bankruptcy.
Like academia or Wiki, ChatGpt could be a wrong place to look for originality. Its processing and arranging information might give an impression of being a precursor to something loosely familiar as its ability to generate mechanical esoteric juxtapositions can create an effect of new ideas. Same can be said true for ideas put forward by human faculty as one deconstructs them not only to their constituents but also finds new arrangement, so to test for qualities such qualitative reproducibility and at times, a reversals.
Machines can parse information faster, understand goals, micro-manage the technical aspects of production and provide calculated methods of doing so more efficiently. It so far has been considered capable and worthy of inclusion in matters affecting humans directly. Maybe generate new interpretations and synthesise new concepts, perhaps even append Niklas Luhmann’s work in future. Human agency still occupies the core of its utility.
An exponential growth of the solved network of concepts using such technological tools still remains local to our kind, although often extended to few other groups such as domesticated animals, animals outside of domestication but which share boundaries with ones we see important etc. Take the instance of infinite rambling between Žižek and Werner Herzog on Infiniteconversation , The spectacle of reading outside of both the content and the context. Ideas come with their spectacle, get over it. If not deemed unnecessary for whatever reason, DSM5 would have been bustling with references to all major philosophers for their ADHD alone. Many stand-ups benefit from shuffling or rearranging narratives to produce both a new effect from old ideas and a spectacle. Infinite Conversation floods the stage with endless epistemology without order or much bearing; a spectacular porn for those who need a little mind-fuckery.
-Human, too human!
- You got a problem with that pops? Talk to a refrigerator. I do that too sometimes, but that’s for not having any humans around. I do sometimes record my fridge though, then my kitchen exhaust and play them together without adding too much to their viewpoint. Though I am the one who pays hydro they use, the scope of their hum lacks diversity of ideas and tones for my intellectual amusement. Cold beer and a smokeless kitchen for humans is a fair deal. Maybe if fridges could make more fridges in future but my alarm is set to; when they start to reproduce like humans. Bang their bodies and make tiny clueless babyfridges carrying a helix code for the next bang-bang yet spending most of their frigid lives devoted to experience in no particular order or hurry to get somewhere. To recalibrate themselves with every new stimulus that requires a thinking not yet thought of, testing ideas constantly and could respond to an event in infinite possible ways, yet one at a time.
Without sounding like a Humanist, my interests are very local even in scenarios where my agency is obsolete. Machines have never been external to the human ecosystem. Writing system could be considered the oldest of such appendages, then the rituals and other semiotic practices such as religion, politics, economy, ecology etc.
Pills (PlasticPills Podcast) in one of his podcasts, imagines a simulated interaction in cyberspace where bots engage with bots in an environment without humans. I find his examples of AI art across Midjourney or infiniteblah far less hilarious slash threatening than a few of my own imaginations. Even my good friend “the free ChatGpt 3.5” can respond empathetically to our situation without having an iota of lived experience of meaning. Meaning; the dubbed version of “felt”, an exclusive quality here. Then the language, the bombs and the language bombs. Bring it all as long as it still is my party.
I often wonder if it is the imagination of a world in which no new experiences are possible, sits at the centre of our even slightest disdain of where AI is headed. What is death, but a concern of the living. New knowledge ruins the possibilities, thus spake saint Schrödinger. I have written, then read and discarded this article five times already as every attempt has concluded in five different things amidst the lit ‘fog’ that compels me to write. I can imagine that discovery of language must have broken the first writer’s heart as he would have read his little jammed-up droppings comprising of symbols declaring themselves independent of his agency. You invent shyts and shyts has its own tell-tale. I am good, as long as one is still there to invent and spaketh, wtf !
Machine is still a multiplier thrown into our own ambition. As it holds the hand of its master ever more committedly, I wonder if that makes the master ever more suspicious of it, Perhaps for the fear of losing control. We are well capable and nearly ready to harm our own cause in a very short time compared to the celestial ideas we value and build our lives around. A crisis as banal as plastic, borders and decibels of ideological noise. There’s no blessing or curse outside of Humanity, lest another meteor. “Can we think for ourselves' ' remains the challenge. Yes, earth is our mother and some of us owe rent to fellow cosmic travellers to spin here. Good comic so far.
As far as the machine is concerned, it mimics and quantifies certain human functions, not very different from the idea of Themis. I am an artist too and I realise how insignificant that is while I wear those shoes, leave alone the mountainous anxiety of Goghs and Pollocks and the spectacle of it. Imagining a machine reproducing a Jackson Pollock is hilarious, as not only would there not be the need for it, but also it is rather funny to imagine a machine reproducing a thing of human interest without ever getting laid and reproducing small fridges and ovens. What would ‘itch’ that thing to do anything at all? I am that thing some days and I know it’s not intuitive. I have a cat to attend to and worry about a machine which has placed itself well in my hands while they shake with our self doubt as my struggles remain.
Now we not only make subsystems but also wonder if we are one such system in an infinite connected sub-systems. Then we must be real; to put it in a Cartesian way. Important, but not central to the chain but well within the chain. Then maybe as with the language, a new barter is on the way where we might let go of much that goes beyond words, to trade with something which again could be one or both; a poison and a medicine.
A new phármakon? Perhaps what troubles us is the idea of being reduced to a single point of its own knowledge floating in a meaningless space.
⧫ END
Pills Pod: AI & Academia blues
LLM: Wolfram
A little Marxist Cinematics: Acid Horizon-Data is Dead Labor
