“Concerning”; World’s Most Humanlike AI Program Kills Itself Attempting to Generate a 10 Quadrillion Pixel Image of A Hamburger For Seemingly No Reason

Can we get controversial for a second? I don’t think I’ve ever read or watched a single piece of fiction about artificial intelligence that was anywhere near as profound as it thought it was. Pluto? Ghost in the Shell? Blade Runner? That Will Smith I, Robot movie? It’s all the same shit. These works all seem to broach the theme/question of AI with the same basic proposal: What if there existed a being that was basically the exact same as us— except it came from silicone, not flesh? Like, okay? What if? I guess if it was the same as us, it would be the same as us. What if there was a piece of igneous rock that looked like a bird and acted like a bird and flew like a bird? Yeah, that would be pretty crazy I guess. We better include like eighty scenes where a bunch of biologists stand around going “What separates rock and bird? Sure, it can fly… but it’ll never know how it feels to sit around at eat worms…” It’s the same level of discourse as those guys in Monty Python arguing about whether or not a Witch can float like a piece of wood. And yeah, yeah, I get it— it’s not really about machine personhood as much as it is about making people reflect on the nature of consciousness. How profound. It’s so brave of you to ruminate on the theoretical welfare of a totally hypothetical class of being, rather than applying that same level of inquisitiveness  towards the already existing living beings that are imprisoned and tortured in factory farms en-masse. (Seriously— what was the last movie you saw that actually interrogated— from a sympathetic standpoint— the difference between humans and animals? The original planet of the Apes? The state of sci-fi is in desperate need of some kind of creative reset) Astro Boy at least had the nuts (and bolts) to use its robots as an allegory for racial justice (in the 50s!) instead of some navel-gazey philosophy 101 thought experiment. 

What’s more interesting to me is the sort of meta-question raised by all this, which this comic sorta engages with; why are we so obsessed with the idea of machines acting like humans? Maybe it’s a stupid thing to ask— nobody wants to read a story about a maximally effective, totally passionless and unreflective supercomputer. We want to read one about a vengeful freak who takes revenge on his creators. But even AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is sort of unique by virtue of this sort of totally anti-life, anti-human monstrosity. Surely there’s space in media for these more interesting, more aberrant takes on the story of an artificial being that comes to life, right? Or are we curse to oscillate between “Beep boop. Illogical, illogical, KILL” Ultra/Hal 9000 types, and the “Oooh look at this flower, I’m just like you” Astro Boy/Sunny (From that Will Smith I, Robot movie) types? I guess, ultimately, my gripe is the same as it always is; I don’t like it when people make uninteresting art. What a shocker. But goddamn, the whiplash between the hype for Ghost In The Shell and Pluto versus the actual experience of watching/reading Ghost In The Shell and Pluto was enough to make me question my own sanity. 

The ending of this comic is a bit strange. I don’t know that any silicon valley AI-monger of a sort like Mr. Glean here would ever get sentimental or wax poetic about AI the way he does here. Sure, they might participate in some futurist posturing where they say some corny shit like “Seriously! I think chatGPT could qualify as being a living, breathing, person!” and then pull some Isaac Asimov quote out of their ass, but that kinda thing always just strikes me as pandering to earnest reddit-types. Zuckerbergs, all of them. The real function of the ending is to sort of posit the notion of an artificial consciousness which isn’t just smarter than us, but actually far more wistful, sentimental, and emotionally overwhelmed by the state of being in the world. What leg does humanity have to stand on when we get outflanked on the very qualities we use to differentiate ourselves as special, soulful, and worthy of tenderness? Hmmm… maybe the utility monster ISN’T  merely an urban myth after all…