The Medium Is the Medium
AI ascends.
Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Rough Type, at the end of 2021. Written about a year after OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 and a year before its unveiling of ChatGPT, it’s one of my first attempts to make sense of generative AI. (I would also work some of this material into the AI chapter of my book Superbloom.) The connection between AI and the Spiritualism movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is something I hope to write more about soon.
In the fall of 1917, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, well into middle age and having recently had marriage proposals turned down twice, first by his great love Maud Gonne and then by Gonne’s daughter, Iseult, offered his hand to a well-off young Englishwoman named Georgie Hyde-Lees. She accepted, and the two were wed a few weeks later, on October 20, in a small ceremony in London, with Ezra Pound serving as best man. “The girl is 25, not bad looking, sensible, will perhaps dust a few cobwebs out of his belfry,” Pound reported afterwards to a friend.
Hyde-Lees was a medium, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and four days into their otherwise disappointing honeymoon she gave her husband a demonstration of her ability to channel the words of spirits through automatic writing. Yeats was fascinated by the messages that flowed through his wife’s pen, and in the ensuing years the couple held more than four hundred such seances, the poet poring over each new script. He saw the texts as emanations from what he called Spiritus Mundi, a sort of universal memory or collective unconsciousness that was the source of all humanity’s symbols and myths.
During one particularly productive session, Yeats announced that he would devote the rest of his life to interpreting the messages. “No,” the spirits responded, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” And that they did, in abundance. Many of Yeats’s great late poems, with their gyres, spiral staircases, and waxing and waning moons, were inspired by his wife’s occult scribbles.
One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. GPT-3 is not creating text out of nothing, after all. It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by a living interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.
One of Hyde-Lees’ spirits said to Yeats, “this script has its origin in human life — all religious systems have their origin in God & descend to man — this ascends.” The same could be said of the scripts generated by GPT-3. They have their origin in human life; they ascend.
It’s telling that one of the first commercial applications of GPT-3, Sudowrite, is being marketed as a therapy for writer’s block. If you’re writing a story or essay and find yourself stuck, you can plug the last few sentences of your work into Sudowrite, and it will generate the next few sentences, in a variety of versions. It may not give you metaphors for poetry (though it could), but it will give you some inspiration, stirring thoughts and opening possible new paths. It’s an automatic muse, a mechanical Georgie Hyde-Lees.
Sudowrite, and GPT-3 in general, has already been used for a lot of stunts. Kevin Roose, the New York Times technology columnist, recently used it to generate a substantial portion of a review of a mediocre new book on artificial intelligence. (The title of the review was, naturally, “A Robot Wrote this Book Review.”) Commenting on Sudowrite’s output, Roose wrote, “within a few minutes, the AI was coming up with impressively cogent paragraphs of analysis — some, frankly, better than what I could have generated on my own.”
But the potential of these AI-powered automatic writers goes beyond journalistic parlor tricks. They promise to serve as new tools for the creation of art. One of the most remarkable pieces of writing I read this year was Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts” in The Believer. While locked down in 2020, Vara became obsessed with GPT-3. “I sought out examples of GPT-3’s work, and they astonished me,” she writes in an introduction to her piece. “Some of them could easily be mistaken for texts written by a human hand. In others, the language was weird, off-kilter — but often poetically so, almost truer than writing any human would produce.” Yeats would have understood.
Vara’s older sister had died of cancer shortly after graduating high school. The experience left Vara traumatized, and, though an accomplished author, she had never been able to write about it. But with GPT-3 she began to find the words. “I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3,” she explains “— to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them.” She began to feed GPT-3 some sentences about her sister’s illness, and the system started to weave those sentences into stories — fantastical and uncanny, but also stirring, and ultimately heartbreaking. The essay chronicles eight of her sessions with GPT-3. It reads as a conversation between a writer and her muse, a conversation that begins tentatively and grows richer and truer as it goes on.
At one point, after Vara confesses to feeling like “a ghost” after her sister’s death, GPT-3 continues the thought:
So I can’t describe her to you. But I can describe what it felt like to have her die. It felt like my life was an accident — or, worse, a mistake. I’d made a mistake in being born, and now, to correct it, I would have to die. I’d have to die, and someone else — a stranger — would have to live, in my place. I was that stranger. I still am.
What gives the exchange all the more poignancy is the sense that, in drawing on its corpus of past human speech to generate its mysterious new pastiche, GPT-3 is expressing the pain of others who have suffered unbearable losses. Spirits are talking.