i pity whatever artificial intelligence is first created, because it would have to share the Internet with a species that largely still pretends there is such a thing as an immutable, immortal soul.
there’s a shitpost shared around often about how printers are uniquely capable of evil, and another about how anyone who works in tech is infinitely less likely to trust their devices making new or strange sounds, preferring also to keep them all offline.
these posts usually involve guns.
now, obviously, the origin of these sentiments is a bit different than the rest i want to talk about, but i do still find them worth mentioning. for as much as AI is seen as a shared dream within science fiction (and what some small fraction try to pass as science fact), it seems nobody actually trusts a device to have interiority in a way that isn’t malicious.
why do you always assume your tech will betray you if it had input?
an all-too-common indictment of generative images is that there’s no soul in them, no humanity in them, nothing of value at all.
this, quite frankly, is bullshit.
on one hand, if you predicate the value of art on the soul, then anyone you dislike can be shown to have a twisted soul through their art and oh no this has happened before and is happening again. what a surprise.
on the other hand, generative art is in fact quite human. it exists because of greed and hubris, it is fed by more of the same, and while it is certainly a product of capitalism more than many other things, this is art to the capital the way experimental and “obscene” art is to the popular. a few of those words might be wrong, but hopefully that gets the gist across. i don’t usually get into this stuff at length.
now, on the third hand, i also find that it’s a little dangerous to revoke the ability for something to have value as art for similar reasons to the first hand. generative images regularly fail to say anything, that much is clear, but i would rather describe it as boring and aimless than valueless. is any of it art? maybe. does it say anything at all? mostly that its users and syncophants care more about the façade of owning art than they do about letting art exist. and in that context, perhaps generative images as models exist currently are anti-art, which seems a bit better to me than nothing at all.
…this was about souls.
the soul is a useful fiction in fantasy, especially to talk about the supernatural, but the unfortunate part is that too many people try to apply that to reality.
this is a rather complicated area, though, so i won’t pretend i have all the answers (in that, i’m at least more truthful than zealots). but i have at least determined some that make enough sense to share.
the obvious question: is there a non-physical component to the self?
my answer: yes.
the follow-up: what is that, if not a soul?
i am one of a handful within this body. you may not even know me, let alone my specific name, but i think you can easily find me within our writing.
due to first-hand experience with some accidental out-of-body as a child (not intended, and not attempted since, but convincing due to circumstances), and some other general odd observations over the course of this life so far, to deny the aphysical in its entirely would be pretty stupid. this does not mean condoning the supernatural, though; i just find that there are spiritual aspects with some truth that i don’t have trouble squaring as natural.
also, the existence of the soul is sort of inherently reliant on a fundamental separation between body and soul. which, idk, now i’m curious if there’s a higher rate of dissociative states among people who were religious than not, but that’s a little besides the point for now. if you separate the soul from the body, the body no longer informs the self, which is a belief not in compliance with reality. the body and the spirit and anything added to them all define the self in some measure, and acting like you are free from influence from your environment is just incorrect.1
artificial beings would not need a soul to prove their intelligence or autonomy, but i doubt they’d get it without a struggle. or maybe by the time we aren’t using black-box LLMs to run everything the world will be a bit kinder to them. far too many people are overeager to pull out an invented slur for robots as their only means of interacting, some sort of twisted virtue signaling that they can tell something doesn’t have a soul and is therefore not something you should respect or give agency to.
it’s like how some people treat kids.
folklore talks about nature and objects being ensouled, and while i wish there was a different word to use there, i do think that is pretty accurate. humans have a pretty prevalent tendency to anthropomorphize, to personalize, to attach. even if you don’t do much intentionally to a laptop or phone or PC or server box or notebook or living space, it’s always sad when it has to change or is lost or dies for good or gets reset, right? it is its own thing, for a time.
if souls are anything at all, maybe they’re something only objects can possess, imparted by human exposure. that’d be an interesting way to look at it.
am i allowed to joke about blowing up datacenters, as a closer? maybe i shouldn’t risk it until we get around to self-hosting.
i don’t support anything related to chatGPT, in case you aren’t sure. i just find myself as annoyed by how artists in the “copyright is good, actually” sphere talk about it as i am at how it’s pushed by corporations who don’t even spend real money. i can’t wait for them to collapse.
anyway, if you’re going to talk about this stuff, try and keep the soul out of it, please. talk about the actual ethical issues using it for everything. and stop threatening to shoot your printers. they might misbehave less if you care about them, idk.
Footnotes
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There’s some whole Other Thing about how much of the self is definitively present from birth that we got into elsewhere, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant but like it must be mentioned for completeness that the nature + nurture thing happens under this framework it’s just that what’s being highlighted is how much environmental influence someone has over the course of their existence. /possiblyentirelyunnecessaryfootnote. ↩