George Carlin, AI outrage, and the purity test

A thought about AI outrage, and about the increasingly dogmatic tendency to turn generative AI into a test of moral purity among writers. This is a live issue among many of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues.

Back in 1994 and 1995, George Carlin had a short-lived sitcom on the Fox network titled The George Carlin Show. I remember it as enjoyable, though ratings were low, and it was canceled after two seasons. I also distinctly remember reading an interview with Carlin that he gave when the show debuted. At one point, the interviewer asked him what he would say to readers who might wonder how Carlin, given his well-established career and reputation as an anti-establishment voice who criticized things like consumerism and mass-media idiocy, could justify becoming involved with a network television show. Wasn’t he just selling out? Carlin replied by proposing an analogy with the use of a common technology that was prevalent throughout society both then and today. Here’s the relevant passage:

Speaking of those turbulent ’60s, isn’t there something a bit askew about a dissident voice like Carlin’s joining the often-bland sitcom chorus? No, he says, glad to have the chance to tackle the question.

He recalls being accused by a friend back then of “selling out” for associating with some long-forgotten group.

“I was in his house and I said, `Is that your telephone?’ and he said `Yeah.’ I said, `Well, you’ve sold out. You have made an accommodation to the system. You’re doing business with the biggest monopoly in the country, AT&T.’ “

Life, Carlin continues, is not an either-or situation.

“That’s not the way life is. Somewhere in between you make accommodations that you are able to deal with. I need to do this now. I need to show I can act. I need to do something that is intelligent and funny.”

(From “Carlin Does Prime Time,” The Roanoke Times, January 15, 1994)

(Side note: Years later, in a 2007 interview for the Archive of American Television, Carlin said that when Fox first contacted him to discuss possibilities for a show, he thought, “You know, I’m 55, and maybe, before I completely put that shit in the toilet, that acting shit, maybe I should see if there’s a chance here for me to have a sitcom and to pay the mortgage off on this house and set myself up a little.” If you want to hear it for yourself, see the 30-second mark in this clip from the interview.)

If I may be permitted to unpack a bit more deeply what I think is Carlin’s deeper philosophical meaning: He was saying the point isn’t to try to achieve total innocence or purity by refusing to support “the system” or whatever with one’s actions, because that’s impossible. The system is all-encompassing. You can’t opt out of it without opting out of any societal presence or contact at all. So the point, instead, is to try to do something worthwhile within the system, making the most intelligent, wise, reasonable, moral, and helpful use of its tools as you can. I realize I’m extending Carlin’s point somewhat. Or maybe not. If so, I do think it’s a valid extension, one in line with his expressed attitude.

Back to AI, and applying all of the above to it: We gain little by adopting the logic of fundamentalism and taking an absolute, uncompromising, intransigent, one-sided, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil stand of rejection toward this technology. Nor is anything gained by declaring that any writer—or any person—who experiments with AI automatically counts as a sellout, a collaborator with evil, or a traitor to writers, artists, and creative work. That’s the mirror-image absurdity of heedlessly rushing to embrace AI and becoming an ardent and unthinking proselytizer for it.

On the matter of copyright outrage, which is so prominent in many writer’s judgments of the situation: My own books appear on published lists of works that have been used to train the big AI models. So I have skin in the game. That fact doesn’t settle the copyright question, of course, but it does mean I’m not speaking about it from some safe position outside the controversy.

On the matter of all the ecological concerns surrounding AI, the titanic water and energy inputs that attend it, and all that: Those concerns are real and deserve serious attention. But if you’re so up in arms about AI that you’re prepared to condemn anyone who uses it, then it’s fair to ask why you’re drawing the moral boundary precisely there. You’re reading these words on this platform, via the internet, using the device your fingers are touching right now, supported by the electricity and manufacturing infrastructures that consumed raw resources and fossil fuels to manufacture that device and then ship it to you. None of this absolves AI of whatever harms it may cause. But it does show that none of us occupies a position of technological, economic, or ecological purity.

There’s also the fact that this phase of consumer generative AI is such a recent development that we really don’t know yet how these concerns—ecological, economic, creative, psychological, or otherwise—are going to play out in the long term. We’re not even four years into the public ChatGPT era. We’ve seen journalism and academic work published from widely varying perspectives, but the overall picture remains cloudy. And yet some of us are already prepared to make absolute moral judgments about both the technology and our fellow human beings.

If I had to boil down my current response to all this to a single pithy expression, it would be: Just hold on. The dogmatists on both sides are speaking prematurely. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with yet, let alone what this technology will become—or what it will make of us, our work, and the world. Prudence begins by recognizing that we’re still in the earliest stages of understanding what generative artificial intelligence actually is. This means, among other things, that the question of whether writers can use it without losing their soul is still an open one.

Writing was already a technology before AI

Artificial intelligence may be the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself—which, as we do well to remember, was called into question by Plato in the Phaedrus through his myth of Thamus, the king who rejected writing when the god Theuth brought it as a gift to humankind. Thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised, but a bane, because it would allow people to offload their rightful task of thinking, knowing, and remembering onto an external crutch, thereby encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom.

As Neil Postman pointed out when discussing this myth, while it’s true that every technology involves some kind of trade-off, most of us would probably disagree with Thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a profound net benefit for the human race.

Today, with the advent of large language models, we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our interactions with communications technologies, and we are once again called upon to make a judgment with serious consequences.

Writing is already a technology. The real question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing makes possible.

As a writer, can you use AI without losing your soul?

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve published a new essay at The Living Dark titled “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?” It’s an attempt to think through the question of whether writers can use artificial intelligence without surrendering the deeper source of their work.

The essay begins with my recent foreword to Youri Hermes’s The Art of Unwriting, then moves through the questions of unwriting, the daemon muse, creative flow, AI as a machine-muse, and the difference between assistance and abdication. It also touches on my own changing relationship to AI, including the way my thinking has been shaped by writing, teaching, and my current work in higher education.

My provisional answer is yes: a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul. But only if AI assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

The essay isn’t a manifesto against AI, and it’s certainly not an endorsement of the flood of machine-generated slop now filling the internet. It’s an attempt to think carefully about the line between using AI as a tool and allowing it to replace the living inward act by which real writing happens.

You can read the full essay at The Living Dark here:

Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?

The Living Dark Reader, No. 2, Is Now Available

The second issue of The Living Dark Reader is now available at my Living Dark newsletter.

This issue clocks in at nearly 100 pages and gathers essays, reflections, fragments, and related materials for slower, quieter reading away from the restless currents of the live online world. Its themes include longing, selfhood, anomalous experience, language, writing, and artificial intelligence.

The anchor essay is “The Autumn Longing,” an extended meditation on the transcendent longing of sehnsucht that has been nearly two decades in the making. Other essays explore the self that remains beyond our worldviews, the witness behind the stories we inhabit, sleep paralysis and the boundaries between science and the supernatural, and the alchemical power of words in the age of AI.

The issue is available as a PDF for paid subscribers to The Living Dark. You can read the announcement and find the download link here:

The Living Dark Reader, No. 2

Sehnsucht: Alan Watts and the autumn longing

On June 15, I’ll publish the second issue of The Living Dark Reader, my quarterly PDF journal of essays, fragments, and reflections intended for deep and relaxed offline reading, away from the shifting currents of the “live” online experience. The journal is an extension of The Living Dark newsletter. If you’d like to see what it’s like, you can download the first issue, which I published in March.

The lead piece in the upcoming issue is an 18,000-word essay titled “The Autumn Longing: A Personal Phenomenology of Transcendental Desire.” It explores a particular experience of intense, ethereal longing that has come over me repeatedly since early adolescence, and which I eventually came to recognize as sehnsucht, Romanticism’s classic “nostalgia for the infinite,” after C. S. Lewis helpfully gave me that word for naming it.

The excerpt below comes from the essay’s appendix, where I gather several extended quotations from writers and thinkers whose reflections on this longing appear in the main text. This passage concerns Alan Watts:

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Alan Watts’s project in Beyond Theology was to reinterpret Christian theology through the lens of Advaita Vedanta, the Hindu philosophical tradition whose central insight is expressed in the eighth-century philosopher Sankara’s formulation: “Brahman is real, the world is false, the individual self is only Brahman, nothing else.” Brahman, in this framework, is the universal, central self whose divine dreaming gives rise to all finite selves and the cosmos in which they exist. These selves and their lives are real, but they are real as dreams, as projections of Brahman into the play of finite existence, which the tradition calls lila, the divine game or dance, unfolding within maya, the dream or illusion of space, time, and separate identity.

Within this outlook, Watts finds a warrant for appreciating the Christian experience of alienation and longing in a new light. The individual self’s sense of lostness, incompleteness, and yearning for something beyond itself becomes, in his reading, the experience of Brahman dreaming itself so deeply into finite form that it temporarily forgets its own nature: “If … the Christian imagery is set within the context of the Hindu, the razor-edge path between salvation and damnation, with all the magnificent and appalling consequences this illusion has had for mankind, becomes one of the greatest dramatic situations of all time,” because it illustrates just how deeply Brahman can allow itself to become lost in its dream, even to the point of forgetting that it is dreaming and that it therefore possesses the power to awaken.

The experience of individuated selfhood thus becomes, in Watts’s formulation, “a dream that I am not dreaming at all, that I will never wake up, that I have completely lost myself somewhere down the tangled corridors of the mind, and, finally, that I am in such excruciating agony that when I wake up, it will be better than all possible dreams.” In other words, it becomes the dream of the wholly alienated Christian creature-self, lost in a vale of tears and anxiously longing for the inconceivable bliss of Paradise, to be known in the hereafter by those who have been saved through Christ.

It is out of this schema, and specifically out of a model of human individuality as “two spheres with a common center,” the outer sphere being the conscious ego and the inner sphere being the real self that the ego has forgotten, that Watts’s description of a primal human longing emerges. This longing, in his reading, is the inevitable epiphenomenon of a consciousness that has temporarily forgotten what it most deeply is, and that sometimes, in certain rare and luminous moments, it half-remembers:

This fantasy religion would then require the final condition that at some time the two spheres would merge, that my inmost Self would awaken from its dream to transform my superficial ego with a shock of recognition. Perhaps this is why we sometimes have a strangely pleasant sensation of having forgotten something extremely important from long, long ago. Occasionally, this shadow of a memory comes with hints of a forgotten paradise, some luminous landscape of hills and waters which is utterly familiar and yet completely unidentifiable. Every now and then the “real” world reminds us of it, and we think, “This is what I have always been looking for. This place feels like home.” At other times, the memory has a much deeper dimension—a sensation of being immeasurably ancient and knowing, as somehow prior to time and space. But there is nothing at all specific about it, for though the sensation is vivid, it is tantalizingly ephemeral. These are, then, intimations of something to be remembered which is, as it were, a vast dimension of one’s being which has been kept hidden—perhaps from the moment of birth. For consciousness, or conscious attention, is the trick of noticing the figure and ignoring the background, and in the same way I seem to notice my ego and forget my background, the larger Self which underlies my ego.

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The Living Dark Reader, no. 2, will be available on June 15 to paid subscribers of The Living Dark. To subscribe, click here: The Living Dark.