AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion

I'm not sure how this affects the premise of the article, but the "jaw dropping quote created by an LLM about NYC" reads like so much pretentious claptrap:

  Because New York City is the only place where the myth of greatness still 
  feels within reach—where the chaos sharpens your ambition, and every street 
  corner confronts you with a mirror: who are you becoming?

  You love NYC because it gives shape to your hunger. It’s a place where 
  anonymity and intimacy coexist; where you can be completely alone and still 
  feel tethered to the pulse of a billion dreams.

The author of Berserk said it so much better: "Looking from up here, it's as if each flame were a small dream, for each person. They look like a bonfire of dreams, don't they? But, there's not flame for me here. I'm just a temporary visitor, taking comfort from the flame."

> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.

This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.

We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.

For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale

A bit of a rambling essay without much depth, but it did make me wonder: if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person, would all of this hullabaloo about AI and human nature go away? That seems to be the root of the unease many people have with these tools: they have the veneer of a human chatting but obviously aren’t quite there.

I tend to treat Ai tools as basically just a toolset with an annoying chat interface layered on top, which in my experience leads me to not feel any of the feelings described in the essay and elsewhere. It’s just a tool that makes certain outputs easier to generate, an idea calculator, if you will.

As a result, I’m pretty excited about AI, purely because they are such powerful creative tools - and I’m not fooled into thinking this is some sort of human replacement.

"When an LLM “describes the rain” or tries to evoke loneliness at a traffic light, it produces language that looks like the real thing but does not originate in lived experience"

does it not originate in the collective experience ensouled in the corpus it is fed?

There are quite a few practical problems that bother me with AI: centralization of power, enablement of fake news, AI porn of real women, exploitation of cheap labour to label data, invalid AI responses from tech support, worse quality software, lowered literacy rates, the growing environmental footprint.

The philosophical implications are maybe the least of my worries, and maybe a red herring? It seems like the only thing those in power are interested in discussing while there are very real damages being done.

This made me happy: It offers an interesting take on AI.

(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).

Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".

In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)

In Heideggers philosophy objects and people are defined by their relations to the real world, he calls it “ in der Welt sein”.

Llms pose an interesting challenge to this concept, since they cannot interact with the physical world, but they nevertheless can act.

Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.

> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.

https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/DiscourseOnThinking/MemorialA... (p43)

This piece addresses the major thing that’s been frustrating to me about AI. There’s plenty else to dislike, the provenance, the hype, the potential impacts, but what throws me the most is how willing many people have been to surrender themselves and their work to generative AI.

It's somehow a little poetic that the author's chatgpt example has already been plagiarized by a realtor blog: https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/beautiful-suffering-of-...

> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.

As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.

If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.

1. I suspect that the vast majority couldn't care less about the philosophical implications. They're just going to try to adapt as best they can and live their lives.

2. LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this. That LLMs are essentially a distillation of human-generated text makes this next-level ironic: occasionally people will deride LLM output... In some ways this is just a criticism of human generated text.