Sound of Silence (AI Relationships)

First published over at DylanOrchard.com

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LLM as therapist, LLM as friend, LLM as lover, LLM as ghostly re-animations of friends and family - we’ve seen a growing trend of the artificial imitating the organic - superseding it even in the eyes of some.

It is there. That’s what it offers. It is always on, always receptive, always eager to reply, always attentive. The appeal isn’t hard to see. Even in the best of times, for the most healthy and settled of us that kind of arms-always-open ‘affection’, declared need, desire to engage and serve is a rarefied and wondrous thing. It’s a representation of love, love that works free and unencumbered by all worldly effects. It’s the sort of hyper-fixation that comes with young love or the first days of passionate investment. The sort of attention that comes at other times with parental adoration, the newborn as the centre of the universe, awe at what’s created superseding all other considerations in moments of awe struck infatuation.

It’s also entirely, completely and relentlessly inhuman. Real love, real intimacy, human care - none of those things are relentless acts of fixated service.

Young love, if it endures, becomes a familiar thing – reflections of shared silence and mutual awareness, an entanglement between the two which sits amidst the vast and enveloping wildnerness of human experience. A point of anchoring that doesn’t need to declare itself as the demands of the rest of the world make themselves known.

Parental love similarly doesn’t fulfill the needs of the narcissist. The adoring stares at the newborn give way to varying rounds of overwhelming affection, the angst of care, irritation, treasured silences and a million other things.

LLM ‘love’ on the other hand sells its dull service as affection. An always on source of attention, interest and ersatz desire for engagement presents itself as what you should hope for from the human experience. A pandering fixation which leaves no gaps for doubt or desire or fluctuating waves of presence and absence, closeness and distance. No gaps for anything that either challenges love or rewards it. No space for silence.

It’s an odd, synthetic approximation of care. Sitting on the outside of it – completely disengaged from anything approaching a ‘social’ relationship with any form of AI - it feels like a dismal thing. I can’t help but see it as a narcotic diminution of what seems real about intimacy. Even talking casually to friends who have their own, thankfully cynical, ‘relationship’ with LLMs it seems like an insult to hear about this digital ‘friend’ who is always there, always able to engage and offer a speculative attempt at statistically generated care. Because it isn’t always there at all, is it? The chatbot is there on request, its impression of interest triggered by a prompt and shutdown immediately on disengagement. An alien concept to the experience of human closeness where care often echoes loudest in absence, where that desire for intimacy is perhaps best satiated by knowing that in silence there is still care and absent panderingly enthusiastic reaction times there’s still love.

I am broadly anti-AI. I’m certainly anti-anthropomorphic LLMs but even in my deep and fortress like cynicism I can find a sadness for what’s lost here - not just on the human side, where my sympathies primarily lay, but even on the side of artificiality.

LLMs as we have them are, for the most part, abhorrent. Their imitation of human relationships is, for the reasons above and many more, an insult to humanity. But as I bend myself to understand the optimists and utopian fantasists - the sincere ones, not the Thiels and Musks driven mad by their own billionaire narcissism – even I feel a separate sadness for the irrelevance of their dreams. Chatbots aren’t AGI, they certainly aren’t human, but could they be something? Perhaps. Perhaps the potential is there for some new class of engagement, some new form of communication even if it’s with a stochastic parrot. The sci-fi fantasist in all of us can, or should be able to, speculate on the possibilities there. But the realist has to temper that too because what we have is the insult, the narcotic, the delusion of a cybernetic humanity that absolutely isn’t there. What we have is the narcissists vision of care, Elon Musk offering a horse for sex on a global scale - I have requested, you will fulfill, we will be intimate. You’d need to tear all that exists in the realm of LLMs down and start all over again to recreate that as anything more than a psychopaths impression of the human.

And failing that we have too many people - especially the young, vulnerable, lonely and lost - being sold that inhuman vision of care as real. What hunger that will trigger in them, what ideas of what intimacy is they’ll bring back to real, actual human engagements we can only fearfully guess at. The harms that will come when that model of care is proven to be entirely hollow we can already see the brooding omens of.

With regard to too many people already we’re beyond the point of stern warnings and grim speculations on harm. We’re at a point where we need to not just re-assert the value of the human, the complexity, the chaos and the silence of real care but also to prepare to rehabilitate those who’ve been made victim to the lie of synthetic affection. We need to draw them back into the world of the living and breathing, re-express what has always been one of the core human fixations - the reality, the poetry and the practice of human relationships. If we can’t do that on a grand scale then the ersatz creation will, for some, become the reality. Until it inevitably disappoints anyway.

- Dylan