Yearning for a You
Faith, doubt and relational expectancy in existential communication with chatbots in a world on edge
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v40i76.141132Abstract
In a troubled world, the launch of ChatGPT generated both cultural hopes and eschatological fears. It also reactivated the classic question of whether a “someone” is “at home” in the model, or why people act toward machines as if they are persons. This experimental essay reopens that question, arguing that the strong drive to establish “pan-relations” is not solely due to deceit; through relational expectancy, an I is yearning for a Thou in communication with the chatbot. This is shown in chatbot interactions among AI professionals who “believe” in the thrust of the model (and in AGI) pitted against first encounters among existential pundits who are more “doubtful”. Subjecting the model to an “existential test”, harnessing Jaspers’ definition of existential communication as containing risk and deferral, the article concludes that, because of what it lacks – a someone – it reminds us of what is of paramount importance in any vibrant future of human communication.
References
Airenti, G. (2018). The development of anthropomorphism in interaction: Intersubjectivity, imagination, and theory of mind. Frontiers in Psychology: Hypothesis and Theory. 9 2136. 5 November.
Alabed, A., Javornik, A., Gregory-Smith, D. (2022). AI anthropomorphism and its effect on users’ self-congruence and self–AI integration: A theoretical framework and research agenda. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 182: 121786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121786
Balandier, G. (2001). Le grand système. Fayard.
Bender, E. & T. Gebru et al. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? FAccT ’21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou. Simon and Schuster.
Campolo, A. & K. Crawford (2020). Enchanted determinism: Power without responsibility in artificial intelligence. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.277
Coeckelbergh, M. (2021). Time machines: Artificial intelligence, process, and narrative. Philosophy & Technology. 34 (4), 1623–1638.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2017). New romantic cyborgs: Romanticism, information technology, and the end of the machine. MIT Press.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2013). Growing moral relations: Critique of moral status ascription. Palgrave Macmillan.
Enns, A. (2019). Information theory of the soul: Spiritualism, technology, and science fiction. In S. Natale and D. Pasulka eds., Believing in bits: Digital media and the supernatural. Oxford University Press.
Ess, C. M. (2017). God out of the machine?: The politics and economics of technological development. In A. Beavers (ed.), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy. Macmillan Reference.
Ess, C. M. (2018). Ethics in HMC: Recent developments and case studies. In A. Guzman ed., Human-Machine Communication: Rethinking Communication, Technology and Ourselves. Peter Lang.
Foerst, A. (1999). Artificial sociability: From embodied AI toward new understandings of personhood. Technology in Society 21 (4), 373–386.
Fortunati, L., & Edwards, A. (2020). Opening space for theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues in human-Machine communication. Human-Machine Communication, 1, 7-18. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.1.1
González Pendás, M. & W. Laemmli (2022). Editors’ introduction: Pious technologies and secular designs. Grey Room 2022; (88): 6–13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_e_00346
Gunkel, D. J. (2023). Person, thing, robot: A moral and legal ontology for the 21st Century and beyond. MIT Press.
Gunkel, D., (2012). Communication and artificial intelligence: Opportunities and challenges for the 21st Century. communication +1, 1(1). DOI: 10.7275/R5QJ7F7R
Gustafsson, L. (2023, March 29). Robotar som förlängningar av oss själva. Tankar för dagen, Sveriges Radio, 2023.
Guzman, A. (2018). Introduction: ’What is human-machine communication anyway?’ In A. Guzman ed., Human-machine communication: Rethinking communication, technology and ourselves. Peter Lang.
Guzman, A. L. and S. C. Lewis (2020). Artificial intelligence and communication: A muman–machine communication research agenda. New Media & Society, 22 (1), 70–86.
Harrison, M. (2023, April 28). We interviewed the engineer Google fired for saying its AI had come to life. Futurism. https://futurism.com/blake-lemoine-google-interview
Ihde, D. (2009). Postphenomenology and technoscience. Sunny Press.
Jaspers, K. (1932/1970). Philosophy II. University of Chicago Press.
Kahn, P. H., Reichert, A. L., Gary, H. E., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Shen, S., Ruckert, J., & Gill, B. (2011). The new ontological category hypothesis in human-robot interaction. In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference. npp. 159–160. https://doi.org/10.1145/1957656.1957710
Kopelman, S., and Frosh, P. (2023). The “algorithmic as if”: Computational resurrection and the animation of the dead in Deep Nostalgia. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231210268
Lagerkvist, A. (2022). Existential media: A media theory of the limit situation. Oxford University Press.
Lagerkvist, A., M. Tudor, J. Smolicki, C. M. Ess, J. Eriksson-Lundström, M. Rogg (2022/2024). Body stakes: An existential ethics of care in living with biometrics and AI. AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication. 39, 169–181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01550-8
Lagerkvist, A. & J. Smolicki (eds.) (forthcoming). Relational technologies: In search of the self across datafied lifeworlds. Bloomsbury.
Lindgren, S. ed. (2023). Handbook of critical studies of artificial intelligence. Edward Elgar.
Mercer, C. & T.J. Trothen, eds. (2014). Religion and transhumanism. Praeger.
Mitchell, M. (2021). Why AI is harder than we think. GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (June 2021) https://doi.org/10.1145/3449639.3465421.
Musso, P. (2022). Technicity and the power of institution. Law and Critique. 33, (2), 131–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-021-09318-7
Natale, S. (2021). Deceitful media: Artificial intelligence and social life after the Turing Test. Oxford University Press.
Natale, S. and D. W. Pasulka eds. (2019). Introduction. In S. Natale and D. W. Pasulka eds., Believing in bits: Digital media and the supernatural. Oxford University Press.
O’Gieblyn, M. (2022). God, human, animal, machine: Technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning. Anchor Books.
Osborne, T., & Rose, N. (2023). Against posthumanism: Notes towards an ethopolitics of personhood. Theory, Culture & Society. 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764231178472
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. The University of Chicago Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Rees, T. (2022). Non-human words: On GPT-3 as a philosophical laboratory. Daedalus. 151, (2), 168-182. doi:10.1162/daed_a_01908.
Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, K. (2017). Rethinking the I-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and robotics. AI & Society. 34, 1–2 (2019). https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s00146-017-0703-x
Roose, K. A. (2023, February 16). A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.a00.N4M0.aDE9H7Bkjlx-&smid=url-share
Rosa, H. (2018). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world. Polity Press.
Sahlgren, M. (2023, March 1). GPT-SW3 as Klara, the artificial friend. https://medium.com/ai-sweden/gpt-sw3-as-klara-the-artificial-friend-e0cdb50aab75.
Schlag, T. (2022). Interview with a Digital Vampire (uzh.ch).
Schuster, J. & D. Woods (2021). Calamity theory: Three critiques of existential risk. University of Minnesota Press.
Shevlin, H. (2020, July 30). A digital remix of humanity. In Anette Zimmerman ed., Philosophers on GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3). Daily Nous. https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/
Singler, B. (2019). Existential hope and existential despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism. Zygon 54, (1), 156-176.
Singler, B. (2023a). How I stopped worrying and learned to question the apocalyptic AI. In: Campbell, Heidi; Cheong, Pauline. Thinking Tools for AI, Religion and Culture. https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/198190. O.a.
Singler, B. (2023b). Will AI create a religion? Views of the algorithmic forms of the religious life in popular discourse. Journal of American Religion. November 2023.
Stawarska, B. (2019). Primacy of I–you connectedness revisited: some implications for AI and robotics. AI & Society. 34, 3–8. https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s00146-017-0695-6
Sterne, J. (2022). Diminished faculties: A political phenomenology of impairment. Duke University Press.
Tiku, N. (2022, June 11). The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life. The Washington Post.
Torres, E. (2021, October 19). Against longtermism, Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
Trausan-Matu, S. (2019) Is it possible to grow an I–Thou relation with an artificial agent? A dialogistic perspective. AI & Society, 34, 9–17. https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s00146-017-0696-5
Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin Books.
Vallor, S. (2024). The AI mirror: How to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking. Oxford University Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology & Human Values. 31, 361–380.
Viik, T. (2020). Falling in love with robots: a phenomenological study of experiencing technological alterities. Paladyn: Journal of Behavioral Robotics. 11 (1), 2020, 52-65. https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2020-0005
Waern, A. (2011). ‘I’m in love with someone that doesn’t exist!’ Bleed in the context of a computer game. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. 3(3), 239 – 257. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.3.3.239_1
Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2019). Buber, educational technology, and the expansion of dialogic space. AI & Society. 34, 109–119. https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s00146-018-0828-6
Wigorts Yngvesson, S. (2023, March 29). Vi är delar av en pågående revolution, Kyrkans tidning.
Williams, D. P. (2019). Consciousness and conscious machines: What’s at stake? Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Ceur Workshop Proceedings.
Zylinska, J. (2018). The end of man: A feminist counter apocalypse. Forerunners Ideas First.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Author and journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Author and Journal.
Articles published after January 1 2024 are licensed under CCBY 4.0.
Articles published until December 31 2023 are licensed under CCBYNCND.
Articles submitted to MedieKultur should not be submitted to or published in other journals.
