WHY WE REMAIN ALIVE ALSO IN A DEAD INTERNET

Human intellectuality entails a gap between inner life and external reality, and it is unclear what will happen—or, rather, what is already happening—to this gap in the age of advanced AI.

Dear Readers,

Correction; this piece has been written by me, Slavoj, not Alenka Zupančič.

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When we hear or read about how artificial intelligence is taking over and regulating our lives, our first reaction is: no panic, we are far from there; we still have time to reflect in peace on what is going on and prepare for it. This is how we experience the situation, but the reality is quite the opposite: things are happening much faster than we think. We are simply not aware of the extent to which our daily lives are already manipulated and regulated by digital algorithms that, in some sense, know us better than we know ourselves and impose on us our “free” choices. In other words, to mention yet again the well-known scene from cartoons (a cat walks in the air above a precipice and only falls when it looks down and realizes there is no ground beneath its feet), we are like a cat refusing to look down.

The difference here is the Hegelian one between In-itself and For-itself: in itself, we are already regulated by the AI, but this regulation has not yet become for itself—something we subjectively and fully assume. Historical temporality is always caught between these two moments: in a historical process, things never just happen at their proper time; they always happen earlier (with regard to our experience) and are experienced too late (when they are already decided). What one should take into account in the case of AI is also the precise temporal order of our fear: first, we—the users of AI—feared that, in using AI algorithms like ChatGPT, we would begin to talk like them; now, with ChatGPT 4 and 5, what we fear is that AI itself talks like a human being, so that we are often unable to know with whom we are communicating—another human being or an AI apparatus.

In our—human—universe, there is no place for machinic beings capable of interacting with us and talking like us. So we do not fear their otherness; what we fear is that, as inhuman others, they can behave like us. This fear clearly indicates what is wrong in how we relate to AI machines: we are still measuring them by our human standards and fear their fake similarity with us. For this reason, the first step should be to accept that if AI machines do develop some kind of creative intelligence, it will be incompatible with our human intelligence, with our minds grounded in emotions, desires, and fears.

However, this distinction is too simple. Many of my highly intellectual friends (even the majority of ChatGPT users, I suspect) practice it in the mode of the fetishist’s denial: they know very well that they are just talking to a digital machine regulated by an algorithm, but this very knowledge makes it easier for them to engage in a ChatGPT dialogue without any restraints. A good friend of mine, who wrote a perspicuous Lacanian analysis of ChatGPT interaction, told me how the simple polite kindness and attention of the machine to what she says makes it so much better than an exchange with a real human partner, who can often be inattentive and snappy.

There is an obvious step further to be made from this interaction between a human and a digital machine: direct bot-to-bot interactions, which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of interactions. I often repeat a joke about how today, in the era of digitalization and mechanical supplements to our sexual practices, the ideal sexual act would look: my lover and I bring to our encounter an electric dildo and an electric vaginal opening, both of which shake when plugged in. We put the dildo into the plastic vagina and press the buttons so the two machines buzz and perform the act for us, while we can have a nice conversation over a cup of tea, aware that the machines are performing our superego duty to enjoy. Is something similar not happening with academic publishing? An author uses ChatGPT to write an academic essay and submits it to a journal, which uses ChatGPT to review the essay. When the essay appears in a “free access” academic journal, a reader again uses ChatGPT to read the essay and provide a brief summary for them—while all this happens in the digital space, we (writers, readers, reviewers) can do something more pleasurable—listen to music, meditate, and so on.