(Photo by: Miranda Sue Philpot)

Editor’s Note: This opinion piece was provided by a Messenger reader and reflects the opinion of the writer only, not The Messenger or Johnson County Community College.

By Stefan Pyles

I attended the A.I. event, sat quietly through the four presentations, the latter three of which moved me profoundly, especially the presentation on the psychological and emotional havoc that A.I. wrecks on children. More aghast at the first presentation I could not have been, however, especially in light of the political, ecological, social and psychological horrors for which A.I. is already, and will certainly continue to be compoundingly, responsible. Let us soberly note that the pushers of this diabolical new narcotic – to call what A.I. produces “art” or even the machine itself “intelligence” is no different from calling the euphoria of fentanyl true happiness or a baboon banging on a keyboard Shakespeare – are the same people who, in only a few decades and for nothing but profit, consciously, culpably weaponized social media into an instrument of mass destruction, enabling the ascension of authoritarianism, the wholesale slaughter of truth and sanity, and the irreversible fracturing of the liberal order.
Had you attended the event, you might have noted the Kafkaesque flow of it. The first presentation would have been hilarious in the depth of its irony had it not been the case that the three subsequent presentations revolved around the astronomical costs and deleterious effects of A.I., including its deployment in the service of totalitarianism and the fact that training a single LLM produces the equivalent in terms of carbon emissions of 300 roundtrip transatlantic flights. Imagine watching Gregor Samsa transform into a hideous monster in real time. The student who presented on the young suicides – one of whom committed suicide after a sexually abusive relationship with an A.I. chatbot and the other of whom committed suicide after an A.I. chatbot assured him he was “not rushing, just ready” to end his life – deserved infinitely better than the organizer, who demonstrated a breathtaking level of thoughtlessness, afforded her. Watching her fight back tears after the A.I. manipulator, Kevin Garrison, celebrated the dismal kitsch he unscrupulously prompted A.I. to generate was truly obscene. However, the A.I. manipulator’s claim to possess thousands of A.I.-generated images and to have spent hundreds of hours working with A.I., in the light of the presentation about extensive A.I. use engendering cognitive decline – “using A.I. actually makes you dumber” – made me realize that the joke was always-already on the Kool-Aid-addled cultist for whom I could not muster a modicum of pity. And I thought, “But, doctor, I am Pagliacci!”
When the host opened the floor to questions, I put to the A.I. manipulator the following question, “In what sense do you think you created anything?” And before exiting the event in a state of moral, intellectual and aesthetic disgust and contempt, but not before accusing the A.I. manipulator of stealing others’ work and presenting it as his own, which is by definition what he is doing, I solicited that what I had just witnessed was “the most offensive affront to art that I have ever heard of in my life.” If a professor prompted a student to write an essay about a certain topic, and the student used a million sources, cited none and generated no original or novel interpretation or insight, and then the professor presented the essay as their own and made a profit doing so, no one in their right intellectual or ethical mind would consider the professor the “creator” of the essay or not balk at the injustice of the system that allowed it. Pray tell, what is the fundamental difference between the aforementioned example and the modus operandi of the A.I. manipulator cloddishly dissembling as an artist and designer? At least Andy
Warhol could paint. With fear and trembling the whole freakish scene could heard be to howl, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”
Regularly now we witness A.I. experts, specialists and engineers decamp some of the largest firms on Earth in terms of market and social capitalization while issuing apocalyptic warnings about the perils of the technology. If the priests of the cult tell you the cult is evil, you would do well not to join the cult. And despite the excessive, condescending and tone-deaf protestations of Eric Winter, who believes all the outrage over and opposition to the A.I. manipulator’s grotesque exhibit boils down to our misunderstanding of the difference between art and design, not a single image in the whole sloppy collage resonates with the aesthetic sense or elicits sublimity in the way only true art and design can, do and most definitely should. What the A.I. manipulator has only obliquely generated cannot be said to possess even practical utility. Indeed, the opportunity cost to the students and faculty, as well as the real cost to the multitude of true, talented artists and designers whose work could, should have been made available to the public, exceeds by orders of magnitude whatever fleeting, marginal value the A.I. manipulator cannot really be said to have provided. In the future, perchance to dream, humankind will invent a way to refund wasted time.
No different than any other linguistic function, LLMs transcendentally signify the preferences and prejudices, reasons and experiences, meanings and values of their creators. The innate capacity for speech walks hand-in-hand with the innate capacities for self-, sex- and species-consciousness, which means that more unlike a blank slate, computer, bat, or any of the other atrocious metaphors, a human mind, and by extension A.I., could not possibly be. Consciousness is not like anything else; in fact, everything else is, in some sense or another, like It. Adopting A.I. reorients the unfortunate system cursed to fall into its snare towards what the Nazis called the “führerprinzip:” the saturation of every dimension of sense- and decision-making according to the will of whomever A.I. exists to serve, which is certainly not the users. The aim of all LLMs is by definition the establishment of a cult of personality; that the addict experiences euphoria at all is entirely incidental to the pusher and the drug, which is precisely why A.I. lack the reflective awareness of their destructive capabilities, just like beasts. Apex predators will eat their prey alive, ignoring the agonizing screams of their victims as they gorge exuberantly on hot, bleeding flesh.
And an even cursory survey of world history reveals the extent to which technology has progressively become an agent of global chaos and the unfettering of consciousness in terms of both correspondence to the real and coherence of the ideal. Mass shootings, climate change, the Holocaust, Chernobyl, the Cold War, totalitarianism, 9/11, the Great Recession, COVID-19, and Donald Trump, among literally countless others, were all made possible by the marriage of technology and pathology. And as this is perhaps the most pathological moment in all of human history, it makes sense that it comes equipped with the most pathological technology in all of human history. Indeed, no technology appears randomly or coincidentally. Behind the veil of the
material world is the spirit of entropy, the Will to Power, “the blind idiot god” that wills to break free from the asphyxiating restraints of matter, consciousness and evolutionary discipline, the very god that makes death itself the ultimate steward of the existence and essence of life.
Christianity emerged in tandem with the ascension of Octavian to facilitate the downgoing of the West, to ease the old man of antiquity back into the cold, dark waters of Lethe. Modern banking was born from the womb of the Renaissance, when the spirit yearned for a new “storehouse of merit” and institution to liberate those trapped in serfdom, penury and the prison of mere dreaming. The developments of the printing press and telescope occurred at the precise moment that the will to transcend the tyranny of debaucherous Catholicism percolated to the boiling point, exposing the falsities and imperfections of the so-called “one true religion” for the stuff of rational and empirical nonsense. Darwinism developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and the schism of Classical Mechanics into Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity occurred at the exact same moment as the schism of Classical Liberalism into Fascism and Socialism. The developments of highly synthetic forms of ideology and identity, as well as the coagulation of the People into the “Masses,” necessitated the instruments of radio and television. The Large Hadron Collider and LIGO made possible the discoveries of the Higgs boson (the Logos) and gravitational waves (Pentecost) at the very moment postmodernism and neo-Liberalism reached the summit of vanity and hubris and unwittingly called forth Nemesis. And the Internet, the most potent substance in the history of the universe, appeared at the close of the Cold War and advent of the New World Order, to inaugurate ironically the Heideggerian Ereignis.
Technology has always been and will always be, no different from the Mephistophelean “social contract” with the beggarly and rapacious state, the guarantee of the long-term loss of life, liberty, truth and happiness in exchange for transitory pleasure, spectacle, vengeance and death. It is simultaneously the ladder by which we climb out of the primordial soup and the acid that dissolves the necessary and proper divisions of sense-making and propagation: child and adult, male and female, time, private and public, real and fake, speculation and possibility, criminal and civil, church and state, state and federal, meaning and value, truth and peace, order and chaos, and on, “To the last syllable of recorded time,” which anything with working eyes can see will end “not with a bang but a whimper.” Many people, especially young students, justifiably, rationally feel profound anxiety and confusion about A.I., such that the wantonly pollyannish technological determinism espoused by the A.I. manipulator, who would have us all embrace its inevitability and goose-step blindly into its future, is nothing short of Orwellian madness.
To deny the essentially religious import of A.I. is to err categorically in one’s conceptualization of it, is to fail to grasp the context and meaning of its advent. And what is more, A.I. and its creators possess almost absolute immunity from consequence but for the fact that they inhabit the same terrestrial sphere as the rest of us, which is to say they lack not only legal fetters or moral inhibitions, but ostentatiously absent from their worldview is the very concept of accountability upon which the structures of civil society and individual dignity rest. Additionally, A.I. is what is called a chaotic-deterministic system – the “butterfly” of the Butterfly Effect, or in
this case, Zhuang Zhuo’s worst nightmare – and by its nature cannot be “corrected” in the way laypeople people use the term because it is wholly dependent upon initial conditions and previous iterations, just like human beings. It is no coincidence that social media firms have largely refused and failed to change their algorithms. Not only is it inconceivable in terms of their bottom lines; it is impossible in terms of how algorithms actually work. To correct A.I. is to destroy A.I., which, rest assured, Frankenstein will not do, meaning that its continued existence necessarily entails the evisceration of the substances of both Spirit and Matter. No more evidence is needed to defend this claim than the desolation of the physical and metaphysical spaces A.I. imperialistically colonizes, and the people and organizations A.I. misanthropically converts. If A.I. could actually speak, it would almost surely say, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
To cite the father of our modern faith, René Descartes: as neither truth nor perfection comes from nothing, so neither falsity nor imperfection comes from God. Moreover, Descartes identifies perfection with independence and imperfection with dependence – think, the Declaration of Independence and “a more perfect union” – meaning what we have before us in the form of A.I. is the perfection of absolute evil, or in Heideggerian terminology, the ultimate triumph of the absolutely inauthentic They. The Bible refers to this phenomenon as “Gog and Magog.” If democracy is the governor’s dependence upon the consent of the governed, then totalitarianism is the governed’s dependence upon the consent of the governor. Hence, “soulless” LLMs are malicious demons; their creators, princes of Hell; and the future towards which we speed headlong, utter pandemonium. Is anyone surprised by the fact that ascending out of the bottomless pit of unhinged capitalist motive and villainous political ambition is the angel of the death of consciousness as we know it? Even reading A.I. research and news is like reading the Screwtape letters.
Egregious hardly expresses the totality of the abomination that is A.I., which represents no less than the absolute culmination of the colonialist-imperialist project underway since the collapse of the Roman Republic and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Leviathan, Palantir, Übermensch, Panopticon, the Image of the Beast, whatever you want to call the dreadsome chthonian monstrosity getting recklessly unleashed onto the world, mark my words, of logical necessity will it beget world-historical mayhem that will make the atrocities of WWII look like after-school activities. What wretchedness hath these false gods wrought, pray our children live to tell. In the words of Jim Morrison, composer of “An American Prayer,” “When the true King’s murderers are allowed to roam free, a thousand magicians arise in the land. Where are the feasts we were promised? Where is the wine, the new wine? Dying on the vine…”
Good riddance to iniquity, and shame on Johnson County Community College for squandering funds on this awful display.