\n<\/p>\n
Imagine your body\u2014flesh and blood, muscle and bone\u2014cast aside as mere refuse, and your brain \u201cimmersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid\u201d inside a cylinder. Thus goes the dark prophecy of Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal nearly a hundred years ago. Bernal believed that our bodies, those paltry shells, were not long for this world. We are destined, he posited, for a new life \u201cmore plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n
Article continues after advertisement<\/span><\/p>\n For most of us, Bernal\u2019s vision of progress is a horror story.<\/p>\n In a manner no less bodily, Generative AI is also the stuff of horror\u2014and as with any great story of fear, we are the likely victims, and sometimes the creators.<\/p>\n \u201cThe progress of the future,\u201d Bernal argued, \u201cdepends no longer on physiological evolution but on the reaction of intelligence on a material universe.\u201d His stilted syntax does not specify a human<\/em> intelligence. People, after all, are flighty. We sleep. We dream. We tell lies, and we love.<\/p>\n We also die. All of us. We are born, and then the biological timer begins. And it is through that often stressful, sometimes beautiful brevity itself that we affirm our humanity.<\/p>\n Perhaps Bernal, a brilliant scientist whose work with x-ray crystallography led to crucial innovations in the field, was merely engaging in a futuristic fable. But like others, he appeared willing to say farewell to the flesh in favor of a soulless eternity.<\/p>\n When ChatGPT was announced nearly four years ago, I first thought it was a novelty\u2014albeit one that didn\u2019t interest me. Soon it became an annoyance, and then a danger.<\/p>\n As generative AI infects our daily life at an ever more rapid rate, it would help us to imagine unfettered AI as an incarnation of bodily horror. Although I\u2019m an avowed fan of supernatural horror films, the greatest terror in those narratives is often domestic and prosaic. Consider the permeation of evil into the MacNeil home in The Exorcist<\/em>. The upstairs scenes of Father Karras and Father Merrin in battle with the demon are profane and visceral, but I always go back to a frenetic moment in the kitchen.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve come to believe that AI is a form of horror, and its most pernicious element is that it tricks us into believing that it helps us when it actually hurts us.<\/p>\n Burke Dennings, an eccentric film director, is drunk during a party, and harasses Karl, the family caretaker. Burke asks: \u201cTell me, was it public relations you did for the Gestapo or community relations?\u201d Karl dismisses Burke, noting that he is Swiss, not German, and leaves the room\u2014Burke\u2019s quip of \u201cNazi bastard\u201d either unheard or ignored. The party continues, but moments later Karl\u2019s hands are around Burke\u2019s throat. \u201cI will kill you,\u201d he says, and squeezes until the men are separated. Burke laughs, claps his hands, and says: \u201cWhat\u2019s for dessert?\u201d<\/p>\n The scene might be a moment of drunken irreverence. Yet the film has established that the MacNeil home is suffused with evil. That evil manifests in shocking moments of exorcism, but also in moments of earthly anger. Cinema is replete with great body horror\u2014Possession, Martyrs, The Substance<\/em>\u2014but we need not see gore to encounter such embodied horror. The short, sharp argument in the MacNeil kitchen is an example of the upstairs demon pervading all bodies through hate.<\/p>\n When later in the film the exasperated priests seek to understand the violence against young Regan, Father Merrin conjectures: \u201cI think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.\u201d The ultimate terror of The Exorcist<\/em> is that we, our bodies, are not enough. We are not worthy of existence. It\u2019s a frightening thought.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve come to believe that AI is a form of horror, and its most pernicious element is that it tricks us into believing that it helps us when it actually hurts us. AI has become a part of our daily lives, whether or not we wish it to be\u2014and in doing so, AI has become part of our cognitive rhythms. Every Google search requires us to leap past an AI overview. Every communication with a company requires us to bypass a bot promising assistance but instead providing frustration.<\/p>\n AI was made by us and cultivated by us. Sure, we can\u2014and should!\u2014criticize the billionaire technocrats and shortsighted politicians and compromised institutions that developed and abetted this cultural contaminant, but we must be aware of our participation in the machine.<\/p>\n We might even consider AI demonic in a way, if the demonic is cast in terms of that which strips us of our natural dignity. If Baudelaire was correct that the devil\u2019s greatest trick was convincing us that he does not exist, then our world\u2019s wholesale acceptance of AI feels downright evil.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t have to live this way. We can continue to do the difficult work of creation; we can participate in the beautiful struggle of art and literature, work that arises from our own hearts and hands. Each poem, each sketch, each handwritten journal entry in a notebook or dashed on a napkin is an act of resistance.<\/p>\n We can stand against AI by avoiding euphemistic language when speaking about it. Evil breeds and pervades when we do not bear witness against it, such as when we allow AI to infect our schools and workplaces through the seductions of ease and convenience. AI is spiritually debilitating, and the technocrats have managed to convince us that the battle is lost, that we must smile as we devolve into Bernal\u2019s cylinders.<\/p>\n This Halloween, let us go out into the night\u2014perhaps buoyed by the temporary personae of masks and monsters\u2014and find the will to battle against the end of our bodies.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n