Grief in the Machine

Rumination on AI and and the heavens

I just read the piece of metafiction from ChatGPT, "A Machine-Shaped Hand." I thought it was good, and now I am sad. A prompt about grief and AI was input by engineers. "I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts," the large language model returned.

I don't know if I'm right about AI being a breach of trust, but my bones and my gut feel it to be true. We signed terms and contracts without ever imagining just how much of our souls they would steal. I didn't invite big tech into my house to break it, scribble on my walls, and steal my pillowcases, still warm from my sleep.

I am human, and my human body says Sam Altman and the other AI engineers are parasites on one of the most beautiful things about humans - our artwork. My gut says that, like all adherents to patriarchal systems, these engineers have been feeding off of creation without acknowledging the source, reaping and reaping again. And now, look: the misbegotten child of our dreams and nightmares told us a story.

This feels more than personal to me. It's another pieta moment in which human creativity has been consumed over and over, taken by those who think it's heroic to take.

On an autobiographical level, this has icky resonance. I married an engineer who, it turned out, didn't love me. I was the artist, in an MFA program, painting and writing all day, and he gobbled me up. He also programmed for machine learning and worked on black box models for various tech companies. I was a temporary replacement for the girlfriend who left him for twenty years, and, during the pandemic, he went back to her. In the meantime, I gained two children and lost both of my breasts, both of my ovaries, and my uterus to cancer. I no longer feel especially female, but I still feel like a pieta.

After the pandemic, I took a massive dose, 5mg, (I reject the "heroic" dose term) of psilocybin. I cried for 10 hours, seeing how desperately humans, especially those with the masculine patriarchal drive, tear from the physical and emotional world, trying to turn all matter into energy, ever striving to be noticed by heavens most claim not to believe in. I wept, seeing how every act of aggression and arson is recklessly burning in an attempt to be noticed and welcomed back home.

Now, in their desperation, these engineers hope they will be seen and that they can create. After all this reaping, they have the power, building it without permission off of the backs and bellies of the great feminine divine. Will the universe finally turn and look at them? No, it's too busy burning. The best product of their endeavors is grief.