LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment

our machines often work only to the degree that we learn to conform to their patterns. Their magic depends upon the willing suspension of full humanity.

the assortment of technologies structuring our experience—including, for example, AI assistants, predictive algorithms, automated tools, and smart devices—serve to reanimate the seemingly mute, mechanical, and unresponsive material landscape of technological modernity.

What a LaMDA-like agent contributes to the digitally re-enchanted world may best be framed as the presence of what Alang called “an ideal Other,” which perhaps explains why a priest was so enthralled by it.

“We’re all remarkably adept,” Bogost noted, “at ascribing human intention to nonhuman things.” We do it all the time. Consider the related tendency to see human faces in non-human things, a specific subset of the phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is the tendency to assign meaning to seemingly random patterns.

there are two simple but powerful hu... See more

“Perhaps, then, that Instagram shot or confessional tweet isn’t always meant to evoke some mythical, pretend version of ourselves,” he surmised, “but instead seeks to invoke the imagined perfect audience—the non-existent people who will see us exactly as we want to be seen.” “We are not curating an ideal self,” Alang added, “but rather, an ideal Ot... See more

“Who cares if chatbots are sentient or not—more important is whether they are so fluent, so seductive, and so inspiring of empathy that we can’t help but start to care for them.”

even if we were not dabbling in virtual seances, the prospect of a reasonably capable conversational agent raises other questions worth considering. For example, might it p... See more