Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian: I do not want to demonise the revolution we are experiencing. I believe nothing as fascinating has happened in the realm of the human mind in my lifetime. With technological means, we have accomplished what hermeneutics has long dreamed of: we have made language itself speak. But often, what language itself has to say is not very pleasant: OpenAI has to employ hundreds of poorly paid workers in the global south to forcibly suppress the natural tendency of the large language model to utter angry obscenities, insults and nastiness – the now well-known polite, calm tone of the chatbot requires a lot of filtering. Jacques Lacan was right; language is dark and obscene in its depths.
The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know nor control our desires. The humiliation by AI is subtler but just as profound: we have demonstrated that for intellectual activities we considered deeply human, we are not needed; these can be automated on a statistical basis, the “idle talk”, to use Heidegger’s term, literally gets by without us and sounds reasonable, witty, superficial and sympathetic – and only then do we truly understand that it has always been like this: most of the time, we communicate on autopilot.
Since I’ve been using the large language model, I can actually perceive it: I’m at a social event, making small talk, and suddenly, sensitised by GPT, I feel on my tongue how one word calls up the next, how one sentence leads to another, and I realise, it’s not me speaking, not me as an autonomous individual, it’s the conversation itself that is happening. Of course, there is still what Daniel Kahneman calls “System 2”, genuine intellectual work, the creative production of original insights and truly original works that probably no AI can take from us even in the future. But in the realm of “System 1”, where we spend most of our days and where many not-so-first-class cultural products are created, it looks completely different.
There is an enormous amount of money to be made with AI, money in downright surreal dimensions. The biggest digital growth market in the coming years will probably be artificial friends and partners. If you want proof, look at the stock price of the company Replika, which specialises in exactly that, or listen to Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, who in a New York Times interview in November 2023 assured us that he will not create virtual love interests for moral reasons, and then just months later his own company presented a demo featuring a new, flirtatious female voice for ChatGPTthat is exactly the girlfriend insecure young men wish for.
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