There’s a scene in Watchmen where the Comedian sets fire to a map of the United States and tells the room that none of it matters, the nukes are coming, we’ll all be dust. Then he points at Adrian Veidt, who has just told the room they can save the world, and says Ozymandias here will be the smartest man on the cinder.
Best line in the film. It has almost nothing to do with nuclear war.
The heat is the interesting part
People are angry about AI, not skeptical nor opposed. Angry, in a register other tech hype trains has not received. Nobody writes essays about how AWS is a symptom of civilizational rot. Nobody has ever quit the profession over cloud budgets.
There’s a cheap version of the argument I’m about to make, and it goes: your objections are psychological, therefore they don’t count. That’s not it. The concrete complaints are mostly true. The training data was dubiously acquired. The layoffs are real and the efficiency framing around them is something people say on earnings calls. If you draw for a living, something was done to you without your consent and nobody has offered you anything for it since. None of that needs a psychologist.
The shadow needs somewhere to go
The shadow is the part of yourself you’ve decided isn’t you. Not necessarily evil, just disowned. The laziness, the pettiness, the suspicion that you’re faking it. Disowning it doesn’t get rid of it, it just sends it looking for a host, and it lands with total conviction, because from the inside a projection never feels like a projection. It feels like noticing.
“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face,” Jung wrote in Aion, and the sentence does a lot of work if you read the accusations against LLMs with it in hand:
- Produces confident text about things it hasn’t checked
- Recombines what it read without understanding any of it
- Agrees with whatever the person in front of it already believes
- Takes other people’s work and files the serial numbers off
- Optimizes for the appearance of effort instead of effort
Every item on that list describes a genre of human knowledge work that was doing perfectly well before 2022. The machine didn’t invent any of these failure modes. It industrialized them, and industrializing something makes it visible at a scale where you can’t keep pretending it’s rare. That’s the part that stings. Not that the output is inhuman. That it’s a good likeness.
A projection needs a hook to hang on, and this one has an unusually good hook: the model is compressed out of what we wrote. You are supposed to recognize something in it.
What got threatened first
The jobs argument gets made loudly and it’s real, but I don’t think it’s the first injury for most people arguing about this online. Jung’s persona is the face you present to the world, and for a lot of this industry the persona is competence. I’m the one who can do the thing. That’s the entire mask.
A machine doing a mediocre version of the thing in nine seconds doesn’t take your salary this quarter. It takes the mask, immediately and in public. “I am afraid I’m about to be ordinary” is a humiliating sentence. “They stole the training data” is a righteous one. Both are available and both may be true, and people reliably reach for the one that doesn’t cost them anything to say.
Nobody is neutral, which is the tell
The thing that convinces me something archetypal is loose here is the missing centrist position. It’s a world-ending superintelligence, or it’s a stochastic parrot that can’t count the ‘r’s in strawberry, and the same person will hold both of those in the same week depending on who they’re arguing with. That’s not how people talk about tools. No one holds both of those opinions about a compiler.
“The gods have become diseases,” Jung wrote in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, and the line is less mystical than it sounds. We stopped having sanctioned places to put the religious reflexes but the reflexes stayed. Then something showed up that is enormous, opaque, made of language, and arguable in both directions about whether there’s anyone home. It is close to an ideal surface.
The other projection
Since I’m standing on one side of this: the people building the stuff are doing the identical thing in the other direction. We’re summoning a mind. This is the last invention that matters. That is inflation in the clinical sense, an ego trying on an archetype several sizes too large, and it manufactures precisely the backlash it has coming. Every press release about creating a god buys a proportional quantity of “it’s just autocomplete.”.
Enantiodromia is the word Jung borrowed from Heraclitus for this: push a thing far enough and it turns into its opposite. The most aggressively rationalist project of my lifetime has produced the most religious public argument of the decade, on both sides, and nobody involved will accept that description of themselves.
I co-write posts here with a model, including this one. The workflow is written down in the repo and has been for a while, so this is disclosure rather than confession, but it does mean I’m not a neutral party and you should discount accordingly. It also means the thing I’m accusing everyone of projecting onto helped me word the accusation, which I’ve decided is funny.
The cinder
Both camps are carrying the same picture and I don’t think either of them has looked at it.
The doomer’s cinder has a machine standing on it, having optimized something all the way to completion. The artist’s cinder has a marketing executive standing on it, richer than anyone has ever been, surrounded by nothing worth owning. It’s the same frame. One clever thing, alone, on a burnt world. The argument is about casting the blame.
Withdrawing a projection is not supposed to feel good. You take the thing back and now it’s yours, and what you’re left with is not a settled argument but a worse mood and marginally better information. I’m not selling that. I only notice the picture keeps turning up, and that the Comedian’s line works because he isn’t really describing Ozymandias. He’s describing what he’d do with the same leverage. He’s the only one in the room laughing.