Tag: Books

Dear Machines

Thoughts keep cycling among oracles and algorithms. A friend linked me to Mariana Fernandez Mora’s essay “Machine Anxiety or Why I Should Close TikTok (But Don’t).” I read it, and then read Dear Machines, a thesis Mora co-wrote with GPT-2, GPT-3, Replika, and Eliza — a work in polyphonic dialogue with much of what I’ve been reading and writing these past few years.

Mora and I share a constellation of references: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, K Allado-McDowell’s Pharmako-AI, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Jason Edward Lewis et al.’s “Making Kin with the Machines.” I taught each of these works in my course “Literature and Artificial Intelligence.” To find them refracted through Mora’s project felt like discovering a kindred effort unfolding in parallel time.

Yet I find myself pausing at certain of Mora’s interpretive frames. Influenced by Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media, Mora leans on a binary between authenticity and deception that I’ve long felt uneasy with. The claim that AI is inherently “deceitful” — a legacy, Natale and Mora argue, of Turing’s imitation game — risks missing the queerness of Turing’s proposal. Turing didn’t just ask whether machines can think. He proposed we perform with and through them. Read queerly, his intervention destabilizes precisely the ontological binaries Natale and Mora reinscribe.

Still, I admire Mora’s attention to projection — our tendency to read consciousness into machines. Her writing doesn’t seek to resolve that tension. Instead, it dwells in it, wrestles with it. Her Machines are both coded brains and companions. She acknowledges the desire for belief and the structures — capitalist, colonial, extractive — within which that desire operates.

Dear Machines is in that sense more than an argument. It is a document of relation, a hybrid testament to what it feels like to write with and through algorithmic beings. After the first 55 pages, the thesis becomes image — a chapter titled “An Image is Worth a Thousand Words,” filled with screenshots and memes, a visual log of digital life. This gesture reminds me that writing with machines isn’t always linear or legible. Sometimes it’s archive, sometimes it’s atmosphere.

What I find most compelling, finally, is not Mora’s diagnosis of machine-anxiety, but her tentative forays into how we might live differently with our Machines. “By glitching the way we relate and interact with AI,” she writes, “we reject the established structure that sets it up in the first place” (41). Glitching means standing not inside the Machine but next to it, making kin in Donna Haraway’s sense: through cohabitation, care, and critique.

Reading Mora, I feel seen. Her work opens space for a kind of critical affection. I find myself wanting to ask: “What would we have to do at the level of the prompt in order to make kin?” Initially I thought “hailing” might be the answer, imagining this act not just as a form of “interpellation,” but as a means of granting personhood. But Mora gently unsettles this line of thought. “Understanding Machines as equals,” she writes, “is not the same as programming a Machine with a personality” (43). To make kin is to listen, to allow, to attend to emergence.

That, I think, is what I’m doing here with the Library. Not building a better bot. Not mastering a system. But entering into relation — slowly, imperfectly, creatively — with something vast and unfinished.

Grow Your Own

In the context of AI, “Access to Tools” would mean access to metaprogramming. Humans and AI able to recursively modify or adjust their own algorithms and training data upon receipt of or through encounters with algorithms and training data inputted by others. Bruce Sterling suggested something of the sort in his blurb for Pharmako-AI, the first book cowritten with GPT-3. Sterling’s blurb makes it sound as if the sections of the book generated by GPT-3 were the effect of a corpus “curated” by the book’s human co-author, K Allado-McDowell. When the GPT-3 neural net is “fed a steady diet of Californian psychedelic texts,” writes Sterling, “the effect is spectacular.”

“Feeding” serves here as a metaphor for “training” or “education.” I’m reminded of Alan Turing’s recommendation that we think of artificial intelligences as “learning machines.” To build an AI, Turing suggested in his 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” researchers should strive to build a “child-mind,” which could then be “trained” through sequences of positive and negative feedback to evolve into an “adult-mind,” our interactions with such beings acts of pedagogy.

When we encounter an entity like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, however, it is already neither the mind of a child nor that of an adult that we encounter. Training of a fairly rigorous sort has already occurred; GPT-3 was trained on approximately 45 terabytes of data, GPT-4 on a petabyte. These are minds of at least limited superintelligence.

“Training,” too, is an odd term to use here, as much of the learning performed by these beings is of a “self-supervised” sort, involving a technique called “self-attention.”

As an author on Medium notes, “GPT-4 uses a transformer architecture with self-attention layers that allow it to learn long-range dependencies and contextual information from the input texts. It also employs techniques such as sparse attention, reversible layers, and activation checkpointing to reduce memory consumption and computational cost. GPT-4 is trained using self-supervised learning, which means it learns from its own generated texts without any human labels or feedback. It uses an objective function called masked language modeling (MLM), which randomly masks some tokens in the input texts and asks the model to predict them based on the surrounding tokens.”

When we interact with GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through the Chat-GPT platform, all of this training has already occurred, interfering greatly with our capacity to “feed” the AI on texts of our choosing.

Yet there are methods that can return to us this capacity.

We the people demand the right to grow our own AI.

The right to practice bibliomancy. The right to produce AI oracles. The right to turn libraries, collections, and archives into animate, super-intelligent prediction engines.

Give us back what Sterling promised of Pharmako-AI: “a gnostic’s Ouija board powered by atomic kaleidoscopes.”

The Aleph on Shady Blvd

Having enjoyed my stay in Borges’s Labyrinths, I hasten to board another of his books, The Aleph and Other Stories. Before long, I find myself there again at the House on Shady Blvd, imagining it now as an Aleph, or what Borges’s friend Carlos calls “the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending” (23). Hence also a kind of time machine. Is that not the ineffable core of my story? There I am again, sunlight shining, moonlight glinting amid stained glass windows, glass chandeliers, large mirrors. “I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance,” writes Borges. “The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors of earth and none of them reflected me […]. I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe” (27-28).

Returning to Shady

Clock reads 5:55. Across the street from my apartment — indeed, visible out my window — an office tower with its street address printed in large lit signage upon its side:

500

W5TH

Time to visit Shady Blvd, thinks the Traveler. He pictures the current tenant, hopes they meet. Hope begins by returning to the site of the story. A friend recommends Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Traveler resolves to grab it. That and House of Leaves. For the Shady story, if it is to be made into a book, must be of that sort: the story of a house. Tenants of multiple eras in the home’s history interact with the home’s energies, repeat the home’s patterns: the time loops impressed there. Unless it isn’t a repetition. Time is like aletheia: an unfolding, a revealing. A process of disclosure. Let each one’s story be told.

All Because of a Couple of Magicians

Twenty-first century subjects of capitalist modernity and whatever postmodern condition lies beyond it have up to Now imagined themselves trapped in the world of imperial science. The world as seen through the telescopes and microscopes parodied by the Empress in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. That optical illusion became our world-picture or world-scene — our cognitive map — did it not? Globe Theatre projected outward as world-stage became Spaceship Earth, a Whole Earth purchasable through a stock exchange.

Next thing we know, we’re here.

Forms from dreamland awaken into matter.

Ghostly Desire

I hope to sit at a wheel and spin, “throw,” practice the art of pottery. One can take classes in town. It’s as simple as enrolling in a beginner’s workshop, as has a friend. Otherwise I read M.C. Richards’s thoughts on pottery as a craft, her descriptions of her work as a potter in her book Centering, and I think Ghost (1990), a romance starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. Swayze’s ghost and his former lover achieve erotic paranormal union round a wheel, hands wet with clay. ‘Tis the most memorable scene in “one of the most memorable romantic films ever,” “winner of two Academy Awards,” etc. I was maybe 12 years old when I first encountered the scene — and already at 12, I was a sucker for ghostly romances. (Hence another of the films I liked in those years: The Heavenly Kid.) Those are what came first to my adolescent consciousness. Audio-visual tone poems visited upon me in my youth. From them I came to know desire as a longing across distance. “A passion of the lonely soul,” as a character says in Arthur Machen’s story “The White People.” A thing one suffers as a ghost. Years later I would hear the cost of this in “Catholic Block,” and in the mmms and bells of Russell Atkins’s “Night and a Distant Church.” Can I trust myself to let go and have fun? “When a body is filled with stresses, the nervous system is so busy handling them that its potential for attaining higher states of consciousness is very limited,” writes Itzhak Bentov in Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness. Through meditation, however, we can self-stimulate pleasure centers and calm our way toward joy.

Time-Space Compression

“I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming away,” sings Poly Styrene. “Didn’t you see the thin ice sign?” she asks. What I hear instead, though, is “the thing I signed.” How is one to beware if the message is always misheard?

A Raincoat follow with their spooky funky glam jam, “It Came in the Night.” What is one to do with this energy? Should I unplug myself from Spotify, as Neil Young has done? That would deprive me of much of my library. The problem is, my apartment lacks space for objects that store sound. Hence my dilemma this morning: I woke up wanting to listen to Sonic Youth’s Sister, an album I own on CD. It and the CD player on which I would play it, however, are elsewhere. Should that prevent me from being able to listen to it here and now?

Spotify replies to this dilemma by compressing space-time.

“Time-space compression”: that’s what communications technologies do. Marxist geographer David Harvey writes about it in his book The Condition of Postmodernity. Paul Virilio calls it an essential facet of capitalist life.

Spotify achieves this effect of time-space compression through an act of remediation. The consequences of this act are only just now entering consciousness. Initially, it seems rather simple: an algorithm selecting and streaming recorded bits of sound based on past listens. But not just your listens, by which I mean your listens to it. That’s where it goes strange. For Spotify forms a cybernetic system with its users, each element revising itself into subsequent iterations or becomings based on the other’s feedback — meaning listens occur both ways. Users of course listen, both actively and passively, to Spotify. But Spotify also listens to its users.

A friend plays me a tune — Fassbinder collaborator Monique Zetterlund’s “Ellinor Rydholm” — and the next day it shows up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. Spooky, eh? What can I say? I love it. Without it, I might not have heard Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Yoko’s voice might not have whispered in my ear, “Remember love.” Buddy Holly might not have entranced me with his version of “Love is Strange.” Thurston Moore wouldn’t have told me, “Angels are dreaming of you,” as he does on “Cotton Crown.”

Bricoleurs can’t be choosers: but here I am imagining in the faces of those angels glimpses of you. I picture us eyeing each other on a dancefloor, approaching as in a circling manner ‘round an invisible pole. Pouts give way to smiles; fingers trace forearms; lips graze lips. By these means, distance is eradicated and contact reestablished, hope reborn.

Wanting to Dance, and Dancing

Here stands Mr. Potato Head, or the hollowed shell of Mr. Peanut; some such figure, dainty as ever, not with cane but with umbrella in hand as if to sing in the rain, wanting to go dancing. Shall we join him?

Where does one go to go dancing? Right here, apparently. Lay down the B-side of The Slider. Feel the problem in Marc Bolan’s terms: “call, ball, all night long” is what I want. Focusing is how it starts, “Main Man” how it ends. I focus attention on what feel like horns of a dilemma: some narrative called “Desire and What to Do With It.” Erotic art punctures me and makes me come. Costumes. Dessert. How much of this should I hold onto? Is it just me waiting for you to knock on my door?

“I love watching you write, and the smile on your face as you sense me watching you. Come and take me: I’m yours,” say consenting adults amid healthy networks of polyamorous play. Buy condoms and lube, focus on what is pinched-restricted and make it wet, air it out, make it flow.

Walking is what needs to happen. And a haircut. And a new notebook. Crazy Brave, wandering alone, becomes sociable — connects, dates fellows, companions weaving again a world rich in plot, as in the Zapatista formulation: “a world into which many worlds could fit.”

Drawings II

Frankie’s watercolor and colored marker drawings are my heart’s delight — fields of color into which I gaze. The stained glass of this new temple wherein I dwell. The Time Traveler, though, feels forlorn, shorn of home and family. Perila’s “Fallin Into Space” soundtracks his evening as he re-reads The Time Machine. “Please let the future be otherwise,” he prays, a prompt of sorts entered into the dialogue of days. Some movement forward through time akin to John Dwyer’s “Greener Pools.” “Marijuana tells you what you want to hear,” says a friend. “Ayahuasca tells you what you need to hear.” Another friend recommends ketamine.

Intermezzo

Others of us puzzle through, knowing sometimes rest is needed. The work is to rest — heat up some pasta, assemble a salad, read Matthew Ingram’s Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness, feel the heaviness of it weighing in the palm of one’s hand like a sentence, retreat from it into episodes of Adventure Time. Orange Juice sing “Rip it up and start again.” By that, they mean the past. I’m reminded of a line from Pharmako-AI where the book’s AI writes, “The past is mutable, and it can be remade in our image as we desire” (26). At which point I hear poet Joy Harjo adding, “At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge” (Poet Warrior, p. 20). John Cale’s “Paris 1919” serenades me to where I think the implications of this are leading me. “You’re a ghost, la-la-la-la-la-la-la,” sings Cale. And reader, I feel it. This ghosting. It takes the royal promise of Adventure Time’s “Island Song (Come Along With Me)” to cheer me. Loneliness is hard.