It is very peculiar. The human attitude towards AI.
Consider the backlash to the generative AI-powered Spotify Wrapped 2024. Wrapped provides a personality digest to its listeners based on year-end metrics (so published in December). What it offered this time put off most users.
Many declared on social media to leave the app altogether. One user declared on X that “Spotify Wrapped is like my annual mental health report and it’s getting worse by each passing year”.
Meaningless genres like “pink pilates princess” or “indie sleaze catwalk” were doled out as “your favourite” music. Users reacted by calling them cringe. Appeasing users with narcissistic pride about their supposed unique taste backfired as they called out Wrapped for producing slop – shorthand for AI spam.
Not that this was the first time AI or algorithms were used for the purpose by Spotify. But in December 2023, Spotify laid off 1500 workers and replaced them with AI. The backlash by users was related to this increased dependence on AI.
The backlash around Wrapped is very revealing.
We complain or critique AI for not really getting us, for mispresenting us, and as internally biased. It is as though we really want AI to truly get us, forgetting that the “dangers” one highlights about it, is really about the possibility that were it to truly get us, it will actually (and not just supposedly) prove to be dangerous, replace us humans, and so on. There is a circularity in our outbursts and scepticism about AI.
What is forgotten is that in not really getting us right or getting us who we truly are, that is, in that gap, remainder or flaw, lies the promise, or the hope for humans. We complain about this gap but is this not what precludes the “dangers” of AI, or, if you like, the coming Apocalypse where apparently humans will be reduced to slaves to not just the Machine but the World Brain?
Music often pertains to a very inner experience, memory, and unconscious associations. There is too little scope for “deep machine learning” to really capture your inner life through the metrics generated by your usage data. The failure of AI seems inevitable.
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And yet the training AI receives allows it to get better and better, asymptotically approaching the quintessential human. Ultimately, what the machine wants to capture is that which makes us irreducibly human, the human soul. In the meantime, it has access to difficult terrains of our inner lives. We hear that machine learning is uncovering neural pathways to narcissism. So if you want your narcissistic partner to become more kind and giving, go consult your AI psychiatrist. Also called Silicon Shrink, it cuts much closer to the inner lives of humans than say the AI Doctor collating millions of test reports about CT scan and MRI.
Tech gurus and entrepreneurs like NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang tell us that presently we are making a massive and historic transition from accumulated data to intelligence. “Data to AI,” that is the great movement and transformation. Data is crucial raw material which produces AI.
The Machine lives off us humans. Remember, The Matrix pursued the idea that our everyday world is the product of a computer-driven digital matrix that feeds on humans.
So our question – what is life which cannot be captured as ‘data’? Can we lead and practice a life today which is autonomous of the Machine?
Perhaps here we might be asking a version of that age-old question society and its thinkers have always asked: what is a good life? Aristotle said, it is a life of contemplation. The Buddha would say, it is a life without karmic accumulation, and so on. Nietzsche would say it is a life where the conscious merges with our unconscious drives.
We might wonder whether that which is beyond the ken of AI, that which is specifically and incontrovertibly human, is expanding in the world. Or is it shrinking? Rather than focus on AI and its dangers and the policies to regulate it, we might want to reflect or even probe the life we are living. How rich is our inner life, or outer life, to begin with? Is our truly human self itself undergoing a change, already simulating that which we claim to keep at a distance? Is the “enemy” getting too intimate?
II
Today in “the age of AI,” narratives about the “end times” or the coming Apocalypse are getting a new lease of life. Machines taking over humans and disrupting society is routine talk among policy makers, governments and tech innovators.
Mary Shelley’s imagined Apocalypse of humans producing a Frankensteinian monster continues to be in the realm of the fantastic but one which is becoming more sub-textual in our lives. What follows is endlessly sanctimonious talk about the need to regulate AI, the dangers of digitalisation, deep fakes, cyber-crime, dark crypto, and what not.
I guess we achieve greater clarity if we imagine a world where “it is all over” and we are already in the Apocalypse.
Such an attitude is nothing new. In fact, popular culture has great appetite for the Apocalypse, and consumes dollops of it.
Movies like the Dune or Mad Max Fury have stories entirely situated within a post-Apocalyptic world. More to the point is the message that true freedom is on the other side, as in the rather cultish Fight Club: “Tt’s only after we lost everything, that we are free to do anything.”
The last scene is where the insomniac protagonist with Marla witnesses massive destruction. The permanent erasure of debt seems to be achieved through the explosion of the buildings of banks, or perhaps the destruction of the world as such. The movie ends and we are supposed to go home with the lingering image of a life of freedom on the other side, where “we are free to do anything”.
We get back to our lives, we work to build the same structures whose destruction is necessary for freedom. Naturally then we must wonder what we can already do in the here and now, as we live our lives in the immense shadow of the Machine.
III
Should we say that today the good life is the life of the schizophrenic?
For one thing, it seems fairly clear that, by all accounts, when “it is all over” (as we heard in Fight Club) and humans are truly free, they live as crazy schizophrenics. That’s how they behave. That’s how they lead their lives. That’s how they relate to each other.
Interestingly, philosopher Gilles Deleuze actually proposed a schizophrenic life as a kind of a counterpoint to the normalisation of the dominant system and dominant order of life. He declared: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.” Proposing “the schizo as Homo natura,” he wrote that “the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.”
What we are looking at is meaninglessness, or the void as the form of life. This implies a rejection of a life which puts a premium on what we can call the plenitude of representation in articulation or even communication. For such a life too easily lends itself to simulation and capture, towards the formation of the simulacra and the spectacle of capital.
Not just that we are a mirror image of the spectacle, but we generate the spectacle in and through our actions. I am already caught up in a situation always prior to myself and yet generated by my actions. It is in disentangling these actions, through say the “talking cure” or “free association”, that we discover our thoughts and the unconscious. This is what Foucault meant when he said that in the modern cogito (as against the Cartesian cogito), thought always implies action.
We must then ask: how does one free action from generating the spectacle. How can you not be the mirror image of the structures you generate daily? What is the life one is leading?
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The great visionary Andrei Tarkovsky seems aware of this modern predicament. Think of what he is trying to suggest in his 1979 movie The Stalker, in particular the scenes about the travel to the Zone and the Room.
For, as Tarkovsky put it, “the zone is the zone. It is life and does not symbolise anything.” Earth and water, nature are all sentient and responsive, in different colours. The Zone is never the same, or even always new. Neither same, nor new – it is anything you think. What you discover in the Room is who you really are. You are your soul which cannot be known. In knowing yourself, you are no longer the same, hence knowing is not possible, or a contradiction in terms. The knowing is what makes you unknowable.
It is a no-brainer now to say that here we have a form of life beyond the framework of data and metrics, beyond the algorithm, by far. The inner life which the Wrapped users found missing by found missing or ignored or misrepresented is imagined by Tarkovsky in all its luminosity.
Tarkovsky imagines a world where the Freudian unconscious loses its power and is dissolved. He exteriorises the unconscious as a world in which we live, travel, and walk around – in our waking state and not in a dream – but as though in a dream. The inner life is the outer – or as Deleuze said, the distinction between the two has no meaning. That is how lucid your life is – completely unavailable to any data or metric. The most creative gesture would be to taunt AI to come and capture life in the Zone.
We must get over the endless self-flagellation about the “dangers of AI”. We must fix our lives in the first place. We need more attention on what it is to be human today, so that it is no longer a mirror image of the spectacle.
For now, our inner life will forever frustrate AI and the World Brain, producing a lot of people disgruntled with even the best AI available. But we can and should use AI, and not be Luddites at all. For one, we can transfer our less-than-human work to them.
Do not get me wrong: I love to play with AI.
I recently enjoyed Google’s Sora OpenAI which produced an enjoyable video for the following text:
In an ornate, historical hall, a massive tidal wave peaks and begins to crash. Two surfers, seizing the moment, skilfully navigate the face of the wave.
Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarisation (FACAM).
