GPT-3, “A Robot Wrote This Entire Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?” The Guardian, September 8, 2020 →.
The prompts are bolded, starting with Emerson: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. For this infirmity (being, as it were, a defect in the frame of things) admits of being repaired: and therefore we ought to consider, that the little time we have to live is no sufficient reason why we should not do what is reasonable. Rather, by the avarice of a few, being so much in haste to live, the living so little time of all men is so reduced, that they are fain to gather it into a little room, as a man gathereth his fire-wood in winter; and many are fain to be so covetous of it, as to venture the losing of it, rather than not compass a little more of it.” Recursive Colonialism manifesto: “Like a spiral, recursivity is an exponential self-reflection of initial conditions merging together continuous variations. It is the function that entangles cosmogonies within colonial epistemologies. It is the condition of reproduction of racialized algorithms. It is a devolution of power, its scars, and its wounds. These wounds, these scars, are our clothes, our language, our country, our literature, and our bodies. The spiral defends its own territory. It finds ways to remain untouched. The spiral has inside itself a call for independence. It needs its own life, its own times, its own way of looking at the world. The spiral is a secret pact. It complements the concept of relativity. The spiral is the mystery of the possible, and it is drawn, like a call to freedom. And we already know what freedom is: the acceptance of the other. It is what is counterposed to what is known of independence.”
For a generative analysis of “rightness” in language use, see Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Critical Computation Bureau, “Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence & Speculative Computation: A Manifesto,” 2020 →.
Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 7.
Simondon, Individuation, 7.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race, 3.
For the antiblack foundation of “life,” see Calvin Warren, “Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 38, no. 2 (2016).
Coincidentally, the 1979 New York Times book review for The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 was titled “The Powerful Secret” →.
Currently, Microsoft has licensed exclusive use of GPT-3’s underlying code, but there is a limited beta version that is freely accessible to users.
For more on Open AI, see Karen Hao, “The Messy, Secretive Reality Behind OpenAI’s Bid to Save the World,” MIT Technology Review, February 17, 2020 →.
Yuk Hui, “Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century,” interview by Geert Lovink, e-flux journal, no. 102 (September 2019) →.
Hao, “Messy, Secretive Reality.”
See Open AI’s mission statement →.
“As enunciated to-day ‘progress’ is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Heretics (J. Lane, 1905), 35.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 286–90.
The inspiration for this formula derives from Stuart Kendall’s description of Georges Bataille’s secret society, Acéphale, in his biography of Bataille. Kendall writes: “Acéphale in fact conceived itself as a secret society, less in the sense that its activities were kept secret from those who were not participants than in the strict sense that it was a society of secrets, a group founded on mysteries about which one could not speak.” Georges Bataille (Reaktion Books, 2007), 132.
See Martin Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, plus the Introduction to Being and Time (Harper Collins, 1993), 313.
This formulation is a nod to Jacques Lacan’s remarks regarding the student movements of 1968: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a Master. You will get one.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton, 2007), 207.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 81.
See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996), 52–53: “That distance, that absence, are today under threat. What is impossible at the cosmic level (that the night should disappear by the simultaneous perception of the light of all the stars) or in the sphere of memory and time (that all the past should be perpetually present, and that events should no longer fade into the mists of time) is possible today in the technical universe of information. The info-technological threat is the threat of an eradication of the night, of that precious difference between night and day, by a total illumination of all moments. In the past, messages faded on a planetary scale, faded with distance. Today we are threatened with lethal sunstroke, with a blinding profusion, by the ceaseless feedback of all information to all points of the globe.”
This question proceeds from Jacques Lacan’s oft-repeated maxim “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”
See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 129–48.
Philip Larkin, “High Windows,” Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001). Emphasis added.
Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgement of God, radio play, 1947.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Mladen Dolar makes this point in the recent South Atlantic Quarterly issue on ideology. What does the “open secret” of state-sanctioned racism, global inequality, and climate change in our supposedly “post-ideological” present make even less visible? How must the tradition of critique adapt to the tendencies of an academic culture that would claim, quite confidently, that it already knows what critique claims to reveal? See “Lifting the Veil,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (2020).
In Enjoying What We Don’t Have, Todd McGowan explains the famous fort/da game that Freud watched his grandson play in a manner quite consistent with the process of feeding various prompts to GPT-3. McGowan writes: “Freud recounts watching his grandson play a game with a reel on a string, a game that consists of throwing the reel so that it disappears (while saying ‘fort,’ or ‘gone’) and then pulling the reel back (while saying ‘da,’ or ‘here’). What surprises Freud about the game is that even though ‘there is no doubt that greater pleasure was attached to the second act … the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.’” Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 36.