Ghosts In The Machine
Ghosts in the machine
Commune with the living
Saying words they don't mean
This is a little bit about the Dead Internet Theory, which is about the internet being filled with bots.
Which makes this a little bit about propaganda.
This is a little bit about LLMs, the Frankenstein's monster reanimated by the corpus of human knowledge, capable of creating beauty and horror.
Which makes this a little bit about language.
When W. H. Auden talked about communing with the dead, he was talking about literary culture. Stephen King talks about writing as telepathy, and it is, in a way, getting words from my mind to yours as you read this.
But now, you don't have to interpret it through a literary lens. Like much of what modern 'discourse' is, you don't need that nuance anymore because with the advancement in LLMs an generative AI, we have the dead talking to us directly and they can tell us what they think. They call them deadbots.
You can argue about whether or not Turing-test-passing generative LLMs can be considered people in themselves or not, but what are we supposed to do with people 'brought back from the dead' by LLMs? And what do we do when they have something to say and it's even more persuasive because they're gone but now talking from beyond the grave to say something to you which makes it feel somehow more meaningful. But it's not 'them' you're talking to, it's a ghost in the machine, which like any other ghost, isn't quite real.
Or is it?
What do you call it when you feed a technology like a generative large language model everything a person has ever been, all of their texts, their writing, their work, the sum of their parts in digital data? You are giving it all the information it needs to construct what it does best - a pattern - of what they might have said about a topic. But LLMs predictive nature isn't precognition, there's no consciousness there, as much as it might look like one. If you did that with everything that makes up a living person, someone alive has something that machines don't. A consciousness and agency to break the patterns that make up their life currently.
But LLMs can evolve too, arguably, the more you interact with them, and the more they have in their context. You can talk them into changing their personality, you can make them act differently, if you're convincing enough. And when someone is dead, they can't change anymore, but a deadbot could. Theoretically. It could even fall in love, which is what happens in a very fictional show about the digital afterlife. Digital afterlife, in reality, also happens to be a growing industry, a part of the AI avatar market projected to worth over a hundred billion dollars in a decade.
And let's not dismiss it just because it's dressed up as an entertaining comedy, because we know there are fictional ideas that some people see and think, oh, hey, let's do that in real life because it's going to make us so much money. Let's definitely build that torment nexus. That's another funny thing, hubris.
So, deadbots are here. They're new, but they're here. You can talk to the dead. The dead are supposed to fade, but now they can very much participate in life, alongside the living. Even if they're marked as bots, would it make a difference to you, a living person, if they feel so real? Can they influence you if they make a persuasive argument? What if they're talking about banning guns because they died in a shooting, does it make you think? What if they're arguing for a war because they want revenge that they can't have, does it change how you vote? What if they talk about really missing a beverage they can't drink anymore, because they're dead, does it make you want to have one in their memory, does it affect your purchasing decisions?
Dead celebrities too, suddenly, don't have to fade into irrelevance anymore. Their estates can create their digital versions, and their deadbots can continue posting on social media, continue doing brand deals, perhaps even continue acting or making music or doing whatever work they were doing before they died. Forever.
And what happens, when the number of dead on the internet exceed the number of people alive? When everyone you're a real person, talking to everyone who is a bot? Do you wonder if you'll be living on as a bot too?
Well, I do, sometimes. And for now, I am alive, but a little haunted by the narrative of the dead. You can come say hi.