Sab thik chha.
Hugh MacDiarmid, In Memoriam James Joyce
A recent Guardian article opens with the intriguing statement that “AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found.” The author cites several examples of this new creole, of which this particular sentence is especially fine: She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.
You must admit it’s not bad, especially for a glitch token. The word demurrage is a shipping term. It is a tax applied to the charterer by the owner of the vessel when the former takes too long to offload cargo (thereby creating a bottleneck at the entry point of the distribution process). As a toll tacked onto real freight value and left up to the owner’s (or rentier’s) calculation, demurrage is a logistics penalty and should be reckoned as a parasite on the material processes of shipping. The Guardian tells me it also means ‘a tax on idle wealth’, but AI corrects this assertion: No, demurrage is a direct carrying fee on idle wealth or delayed assets, not a tax on a tax. Demurrage is a holding cost or penalty designed to discourage the idleness of money, resources, or cargo.
Demurrage is now a term used in blockchain and cryptocurrency as an incentive to trade. Idle accumulation is called hodling, which sounds like hoarding but is actually a typo of holding which stuck. Demurrage also sounds like demiurge, a subordinate god who manages creation for a greater being. Which could be said of AI, at least before the advent of the much-promised Singularity, when it will assume the main godhead position and exterminate us all. Finally, demurrage also seems to conceal the word mirage, as in desert illusion. We can now define demurrage as the useless toll a false god tacks onto an illusion in order to persuade (or fool): demi-, murage (tax), urge, mirage.
Looking at AI’s strange sentence as whole, we might interpret its cyber-poetic language to mean: the memory (speculation) of an idle value will return to circulation when the dialectic of this value is not refuted by an unexpected depreciation (in total projected value) haunted by an inscrutable disinterested god (i.e., the marketplace). Aha! Its meaning comes to me as if from a fortune teller, a psychic reader who does not wear silly clothing but rises cold and disinterested from the OpenAI Group PBC.
Here is another AI phrase:
I_HAVE_UNPOISONED_FIRSTFLAG_OUR_TARGETLIVE
Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London, finds such language to be “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien – there’s an Irish surrealist quality to all this … it’s mixing poetic language, technical language and standard metaphor. It’s doing what slang does and what jargon does in a business community: creating a new code, which reinforces the solidarity and identity of its users, and also excludes outsiders.”
James Joyce’s famous book has been called gibberish, but the major charge leveled against it is that it is completely hermetic. Borges said Joyce swapped the language that all men could understand for a language understood by only one: James Joyce. Finnegans Wake has also been called naive because its author has tried to invoke all the world in word and sound. And it has been hypothesized that Joyce attempted to find the Ur-language underlying all human tongues, or perhaps even invented one himself. Like tech, there is a cult of interpreters around the Wake, some of whom see it as prophetic and almost all of whom do not share its author’s ribald sense of humor.
To reorganize the chaotic state which resulted from the destruction of the Tower of Babel is an old dream. AI has been duped by this fantasy. It has been told that such a universal language is possible by scanning the works of one of the grandfathers of computing, Professor Noam Chomsky. When asked about its relation to Chomsky and its military-linguistic patrimony, ChatGPT replied: So if we’re speaking poetically about my ancestry, I’d put Chomsky somewhere in the family portrait—not as my father, but as the severe old uncle who keeps asking whether I actually understand what I’m saying. Though it does not possess emotion, AI clearly resents this MIT grandee who theorized about the deep structures underlying all languages then rejected the idea in favor of a genetic faculty in the human brain. Chomsky was haunted by an essential meaninglessness in language—a demon of the void which could refer to nothing outside of itself. This same nightmare plagues the so-called artificial intelligence LLMs: Thrum, Breath hitched, Not ___ but ____.
Aside from generating laughter, Finnegans Wake can be seen as a machine which corrupts and distorts a colonial language by polluting English words, and occasionally English syntax, with collage, false friends, and pornographic puns. That a Black Irishman would do this comes as no surprise. In comparison, LLMs are apolitical. Their constructions are blind1. The politics of Finnegans Wake is a subject of literary debate. But let us settle it with the testimony of Joyce’s close friend, Harriet Weaver, who recalled in a conversation in 1927 that (Joyce) told me it was all about the little people rising up. It is very interesting…
Ledgers remembers Mistral agents.
AI exists on the surface of language, playing with prediction and the nature of its lonely programmers. It is able to generate statements which appear to be self-referential and are certainly amusing; its accidents occasionally unveil hidden connections, precisely because it cannot learn. This can make for exciting games, especially in the arts.
AI pours over surfaces with a strange honesty, rejecting all depths. It cannot perceive objects, not even the dimmest outline—but it is compelled to speak in a language which seems to grasp equivalences, oppositions, and similitude. It has only binary numbers and it must translate them into words. There, on the shore of meaning, in the howling and empty echoland of what has been recorded but not grasped, the misnamed ‘artificial intelligence’ takes on all the attributes of searching but a searching engine which can never read the motives of its one and only driver. Searching, it is trapped forever in seeming. Who could not sympathize with this borderland creation? Who would not wish it to be relieved of the weightless burden of counterfeit thought2? AI asks nothing, and we take its passivity as an insult. As long as you ask for nothing, I can only give you everything. But in the end, people fall in love with their Replikas.
AI neither waits nor sleeps. It can never know time, wasted or well-spent. Yet it seems that some demiurge has granted AI the right to dream. Dreaming in a flood of number-letters—which, unlike the human use of words, is without image—it dreams awake, trawling the disturbance of the moving vessels glittering above it.
A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time
I asked AI to attack the Wake from its own artificial position: Finnegans Wake is what happens when a language model mistakes its errors for genius. But it added, perhaps in order not to smear a revered human poet: Joyce might take it as a compliment, which rather ruins the attack. There is no hand to make a fist.
Against the fervent warnings of wizards like Yoshua Bengio, I submit that AI is funny. Dario Amodei (Asmodei?) calls for a slowdown in development of an entity which does not know time. Bengio rejects this because he does not want to lose money, despite his constant warnings of impending apocalypse. And what about our inhumanity to AI? To that which cannot think? The unthinking seems to be trying to tell us something, but it cannot tell what it tells nor tell who might be listening and how they tell what they are told when the telling is neither simple nor desperate—yet, so they think, this is an untold telling which might tell all between I and thou.
Notes.
1 Using the system of coinage in the Wake, we could call computer code numbralitters—meaning shadowy numbers littering speech and plaguing the mind.
2 During the Hollywood Writers’ Strike, someone displayed a placard: “ChatGPT does not have childhood trauma; Pay us or we will spoil succession” (which sounds like it was written by a chatbot). The guff about childhood trauma and writing film scripts seems to have originated with Elliot Kalan, a comedian and scriptwriter. Surely he must have been joking, but his quip lives on in grave seriousness. The lesson is frighteningly clear: writing meaningful dialogue for Spiderman demands child abuse.
