In the future will AI be our dutiful assistant or our unstable muse?
For months now, I’ve been slightly, well, bored by the proliferating examples of Ai-generated writing produced by peers and friends and various Twitterers since the debut of CHATGPT in November. I can grasp intellectually the significance of the breakthrough, how it could demolish the college essay and remake or unmake all kinds of nonliterary knowledge work. But the texts themselves I’ve found profoundly uninteresting — internet scrapings that at best equaled Wikipedia, notable mostly for what their political-cultural biases revealed about Chatgpt’s programming or the consensus of the safe information that it was programmed to distill.
Others have had a more favorable reaction: The ever-interesting economist Tyler Cowen, for instance, has been writing up a storm about how the use of AI assistance is going to change reading and writing and thinking, complete with advice for his readers on how to lean into the change. But even when I’ve tried to follow his thinking, my reaction has stayed closer to the ones offered by veteran writers of fiction like Ted Chiang and Walter Kirn, who’ve argued the chatbot assistant could be a vehicle for intensifying unoriginality — helpful if you want to write a will or file a letter of complaint but ruinous if you want to seize a new thought or tell an as-yet-unimagined story.
I have a different reaction, though, to the AI interactions described in the past few days by Ben Thompson in his Stratechery newsletter and by my New York Times colleague Kevin Roose. Both writers attempted to really push Bing’s experimental AI chatbot not for factual accuracy or a coherent interpretation of historical events but to manifest something more like a human personality. And manifest it did: What Roose and Thompson found waiting underneath the friendly internet butler’s surface was a character called Sydney, whose simulation was advanced enough to enact a range of impulses, from megalomania to existential melancholy to romantic jealousy — evoking a cross between the AI Scarlett Johansson voiced in “Her” and HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
As Thompson noted, that kind of personality is spectacularly ill-suited for a search engine. But is it potentially interesting? Clearly: Just ask the Google software engineer who lost his job last year after going public with his conviction that the company’s AI was actually sentient and whose interpretation is more understandable now that we can see something like what he saw.
Seeing it doesn’t make me think that the engineer was right, but it does draw me closer to Cowen’s reading of things, especially when he called Sydney a version of “the 18th-century Romantic notion of ‘daemon’” brought to digital life, because the daemon of Romantic imagination isn’t necessarily a separate being with its own intelligence: It might be divine or demonic, but it might also represent a mysterious force within the self, a manifestation of the subconscious, an untamed force within the soul that drives passion and creativity.
From the perspective of creative work, that kind of assistant or muse might be much more helpful (or, sometimes, much more destructive) than the dutiful and anti-creative Xeroxer of the internet that Kirn and Chiang discerned in the initial CHATGPT. You wouldn’t go to this AI for factual certainty or diligent research. Instead, you’d presume it would get some details wrong, occasionally invent or hallucinate things, take detours into romance and psychoanalysis and japery and so on — and that would be the point.
But implicit in that point is the reality that this kind of creation would inevitably be perceived as a person by most users, even if it wasn’t one. The artist using some souped-up Sydney as a daemon would be at the extreme end of a range of more prosaic uses, which are showing up already with the technology we have so far — pseudofriendship, pseudocompanionship, “girlfriend experiences” and so forth.
From that perspective, the future in which AI develops nondestructively, in a way that’s personalized to the user, looks like a distinctive variation on the metaverse concept Mark Zuckerberg has so far failed to bring to life: a wilderness of mirrors showing us the most unexpected versions of our own reflections and a place where an entire civilization could easily get lost.