Feeding on Illusions
The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 7
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. You may have noticed that over the last month or so new installments are coming your way at an unusual clip of about once per week. I don’t know that this pace will continue indefinitely, and some of you might prefer if it didn’t. But it has been helpful to write more frequently, so thank you for indulging me and supporting my work. Below, in old school blog fashion, you’ll find me riffing on a post from Mandy Brown who is, in turn, channeling Ursula Le Guin. As always, I hope you find it helpful. One last thing, I’m trying to keep up with reader emails, but please forgive me if I miss a few along the way.
Cheers,
Michael
I regret to say that I have not read much of Ursula Le Guin’s writing. At some point along the way, I read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but that’s about it. This is a matter of regret because I know her work is highly regarded by many people whose opinion on such matters I implicitly trust. It’s also the case that whenever I encounter some fragment of her writing, it always strikes me as wise, provocative, and generative.
This was once again the case when I recently read a slice of dialog from one of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, The Tombs of Atuan (1970), in a brief, bracing reflection published by Mandy Brown on her rich and beautifully conceived website, A Working Library.
The excerpt features an exchange between a wizard and young women after they have escaped great danger but are now weary and hungry with a long way to go before they might find some food. Knowing something of the wizard’s power, the young woman wonders whether he might not be able to make life a little easier for them.
“Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly.
“Hunting takes time, and weapons.”
“I meant, with, you know, spells.”
“I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.”
“Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…”
“Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”
Perhaps you’ve already intuited where this is going. “Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop?” Brown asks. “What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion.”
I find that this little slice of dialog manages to capture something essential about the experience of our current media environment better than an elaborate analysis or argument. There’s so much in it that readily re-presents our experience to us: the desire for efficiency and convenience, the willingness to risk the rupture of a delicate trust (not with a rabbit to be sure, but with one another), and, of course, the feeling of feeding endlessly at the digital trough and never feeling satisfied, feeling, in fact, hollow, depleted, and alone as a consequence, hungrier than when we started. Better than an elaborate study or technical paper, this scene reinforces our native intuition that a simulation, however compelling or sophisticated, will always be an illusion. And we will know this chiefly by attending to our own subsequent experience: “when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”
This, in particular, is a wonderfully evocative formulation: “the creation of a mind reaching for the world.” There is solidarity to be had in that motion and in that effort. A motion and an effort that always presumes both the world and the other with whom we share it, for the act of creation, however humble or sublime, is elicited by the existence of the other who is to receive it.
Nearly four years ago, which is hard to believe, I wrote about the estranging quality of AI-generated images. This was, I think, some time before we started referring to the proliferation of such images and texts as slop. What struck me, then, about the output of generative AI was how isolating it felt:
To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact. I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me. Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a question to another person.
Only another person can be said to be “reaching for the world” through their work, whatever shape that work takes, and by reaching for the world in this way they are simultaneously building or at the very least tending to the “world,” in the sense that Hannah Arendt used that word to mean the relatively stable realm of human things—material culture, traditions, communities—that welcomes us at our birth and outlives us, a realm held in common, mutually intelligible, and of a scale hospitable to the human person. Such a world would not only sustain conditions for friendship, it would also foster an experience of community even in the absence of others by mediating an experience of purpose and presence and relationship.
This is not at all like the world we mostly inhabit, and as Brown is quick to note, “it’s not only AI.” “A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same,” she argues, but AI is not thereby inconsequential to our situation: “AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real,” Brown notes. “Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving.” Slop can only be binged. The simulation never satisfies.
Coda
By pure happenstance, I also recently stumbled upon an article published by an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands, Mass-Driver. The article, “From human hands,” explains why the firm has committed to never using AI in the design and production processes. It was an instructive piece that offered, in my view, a hopeful complement to the foregoing considerations. I learned something about the origins of the letter A and the evolution of typeface. For example:
In ancient Rome, holding a flat brush in the right hand, a writer could make a cleaner line if they began and ended with a short horizontal flick; this was the origin of the serif. And their wrist was less comfortable rotating the brush to always face its direction of travel, so they would have found it easier to hold at one angle, making strokes of different widths — thicker when pulling it downwards and to the right. Our letters still feature this same stroke modulation today. Did the signwriter know their idea would outlast their civilisation?
I was struck by this observation because it illuminated the human traces embedded in the strata of our material culture, the embodied and gestural origins of our treasury of symbols and signs. It is not just that the signwriter’s “idea” would outlast their civilization, it’s that their idea emerged out of an experience of bodily limits and constraints to which I can relate. “ChatGPT,” by contrast, “will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”
Read the whole thing. It’s bracing.
And as so much of this turns on how we frame our limitations, either as mere impediments to be overcome or as the very conditions of our flourishing, I’ll leave you with a few lines of “A Prayer for Limits,” recently composed by Matthew Battles, and with the invitation to dwell on the remainder here.
It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits, which give force to our compassion and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need; which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail; which frame and enfold our measures of adoration.
…
We suffer from these limits and we learn from them. Without them, we would cease yearning even for love. To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded.
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I tell my students that reliance on LLMs is the intellectual equivalent of a steady diet of processed food--it will make you sick and eventually it will kill you.
Visual and musical art is so powerful because it's the closest we can get to experiencing another person directly, unmediated by language or abstraction. Written works add an extra layer separating us, but good writing allows the inner person to shine through.
AI writing and art goes the other direction: it adds a full layer between the "creator" and the subject. Not only is the deeper self further abstracted by trying to communicate their meaning to the AI, but it is then mixed with whatever the AI adds. Like cotton candy melting on your tongue. There's still a little bit of that self there, the intention -- but it's fleeting.