§1 Never give an AI your true name
§2 Now is the time for grimoires
The previous generations of AI, prior to Large Language Models and ChatGPT, rewarded whoever had the best hoards of good data. Vast troves of sales data fed the machine learning algorithms that told Amazon what you might want to buy next, and massive amounts of sensor data helped self-driving cars find their paths. Data was the new oil, provided that you could gather enough, clean it properly for analysis, build the machine learning models, and hire the analysts needed to work with it.
With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise.
One More Thing: Now is the time for grimoires, Ethan Mollick, Aug 20, 2023
§3 “I refuse to write the name of mythical foes”
In my own daily life, I already engage constantly with magical forces both sinister and benevolent. I scry through crystal my enemies’ movements from afar. (That is, I hate-follow people on Instagram.) I read stories about cursed symbols so powerful they render incommunicative anyone who gazes upon them. (That is, Unicode glyphs that crash your iPhone.) I refuse to write the names of mythical foes for fear of bidding them to my presence, the way proto-Germanic tribespeople used the euphemistic term brown for “bear” to avoid summoning one. (That is, I intentionally obfuscate words like Gamergate when writing them on Twitter.) I perform superstitious rituals to win the approval of demons. (That is, well, daemons, the autonomous background programs on which modern computing is built.)
New York Magazine, In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants By Max Read, Nov. 13, 2019
§4 Dæmon (His Dark Materials)
![Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (1489–91) was one inspiration for Pullman's dæmon[1]](https://i0.wp.com/librarian.aedileworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-1.png?resize=293%2C467&ssl=1)
“A dæmon (/ˈdiːmən/) is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person’s “inner-self” that takes the form of an animal.”
Wikipedia contributors, “Dæmon (His Dark Materials),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=D%C3%A6mon_(His_Dark_Materials)&oldid=1185073527 (accessed November 18, 2023).
§5 Our Gothic Future
The other day, after watching Crimson Peak for the first time, I woke up with a fully-fleshed idea for a Gothic horror story about experience design. And while the story would take place in the past, it would really be about the future. Why? Because the future itself is Gothic.
First, what is Gothic? Gothic (or “the Gothic” if you’re in academia) is a Romantic mode of literature and art. It’s a backlash against the Enlightenment obsession with order and taxonomy. It’s a radical imposition of mystery on an increasingly mundane landscape. It’s the anticipatory dread of irrational behaviour in a seemingly rational world. But it’s also a mode that places significant weight on secrets — which, in an era of diminished privacy and ubiquitous surveillance, resonates ever more strongly.
Like the twenty-first century surveillance apparatus, the Gothic mode is preoccupied with that which is unseen. Hidden feelings, hidden histories, hidden staircases. Unspoken truths, secret plans, desires which dare not speak their own name. Gothic literature finds evidence of power or emotion sublimated “three hops” from the source…
Our Gothic Future by Madeline Ashby
… Gothic literature is at the roots of the skeptical Scooby-Doo story, wherein events that might be supernatural are explained by, as Stephen King once called it, “pure human fuckery.” The Castle of Otranto is a classic example, and so is Jane Eyre. Crimson Peak, for all its howling spectres, is still closer to this tradition — one character is experiencing the narrative as a ghost story, while the others are living their lives in a late-Victorian noir worthy of Cornell Woolrich or Anthony Berkeley. It is, as the protagonist says of her own manuscript, “a story with ghosts in it.” The ghosts, while real, play a supporting role in helping the protagonist actualize herself, much in the same way that weak AI and algorithms help us become different versions of ourselves.