The Spectral Evidence for AI

AI is bad enough on its own without giving it god-like powers

(Still from Prénom Carmen (1983) - Dir. Jean Luc Godard)

I made a decision a while ago to not learn too much about tech stuff.

I don’t want to know what a blockchain is. I don’t want to know how coding works. I’m mad I even know what NFT stands for. It’s not that these topics are too complicated or out of reach. I simply do not care, and more importantly, do not want to be made to care. I resent that crass, illiterate, unfashionable men have taken over our world and rule culture. I hate that racist bros took over the internet. I hate that 4chan won. It’s a small act of rebellion, but I decided years ago that if these guys were going to take up so much space in our culture and politics, I would not let them take up too much space in my brain.

A few years ago I had the immense pleasure of telling a person who worked at Coinbase that most of my friends hate the tech industry, and I personally felt like tech had not improved my life in at least a decade. He could not believe it when I told him the last thing I felt actually made my life easier was Venmo, but then again I was literally the first non-tech industry person he had talked to in months (he was from the Bay.)

And that’s the other side of all this that has been making me feel crazy lately. The tech industry is strange because it rules our lives but it also exists in its own gated community. Past fields of wildflowers turned into data centers and lakes turned into deserts so incels can yell at their anime girlfriends, lies a land where people speak in hushed whispers about the world they think they’ve created. Like all things tech, I have purposely decided not to learn much about AI, but this week I decided to dip my toe in, and wrote this as a memorial to the brain cells lost.

Tech is a gated community. They are part of the world, but imagine themselves different, above, and better. All gated communities operate in the same way, whether real or spiritual. All people within the community do, say, believe, eat, look, and believe essentially the same things, but this is treated as extreme individuality that, again, separates and makes you better than everyone else. Whether explicitly religious or nominally secular, all gated communities rely on shared values and beliefs that essentially turn them into cults.

Gated communities, more than almost anything else, rely on paranoia. We’ve become fairly good at spotting this, to use a charged word, hysteria, when it grips white women who think they are going to be trafficked when they find trash by their car, or see a Black person. Or when people don’t know how clouds work. Or parents refuse to vaccinate their kids for no good reason at all.

The thing about all the various paranoias I listed above is that they have real life consequences. Countless lynchings and police shootings of Black men have occurred because of white people’s paranoia. Children get sick and die when their parents think they know more than medical professionals.

I recently decided to self-harm and read through that big, scary AI 2027 thing that people are freaking out about and got a similar feeling of paranoia from the document. For those that don’t know, AI 2027 is a projection of where AI is headed, how it will take over the world, and why we are basically powerless to stop it.

It’s very stupid, and I’m not interested in arguing that point. The whole thing reads like teenage boys yes-anding each other into oblivion about a video game they are playing. This is going to have horrible consequences, but not the ones they predict or hope for. I resent having to think about tech stuff at all because it is ugly and annoying, but at this point I mostly resent having to live in a world where people tell ghost stories around the campfire about “agent-4” and “OpenBrain” coming to kill us all.

The first gated community was Salem, and it’s important that you understand what happened there because it’s exactly what is happening in tech. I know this sounds like a leap but stay with me here:

You know the basic story. In the late 17th century a group of girls in Massachusetts fell into “fits” and after no medical cause could be determined, witchcraft was floated as the cause, and that’s when the fun got started.

Back in the 17th century you could convict someone for witchcraft using “spectral evidence.” This means if you claimed you saw someone’s spirit doing witchcraft on you, that was as solid as DNA or a fingerprint today. This was taken at face value in the case of the Salem Witch Trials, with dreams and spooky animals being enough evidence to convict someone. Further, if you accused someone of witchcraft and won, you got their stuff. Thousands of documentaries, books, movies, and TV shows later and “What REALLY Happened in Salem??” is a very easy question to answer: Paranoia created a loophole for people to exploit the courts and politics for their personal gain.

The Salem Witch Trials have been so done to death in pop culture it’s easy to wave them away, but I return to this moment in history every so often because I find it genuinely very scary. The image of a group of little girls in a town hall, eyes wide, screaming and pointing at something no one can see, all the adults in the room afraid to speak up because they know if they are on the other side of that pointed finger they are dead, is absolutely chilling. I look at AI induced psychosis, of people thinking the computer is alive and talking to them, that it is god, that it wants blood, and I don’t feel too far away from that meeting hall nestled in the woods of New England.

Paranoia is a funny thing. When people are paranoid, you almost don’t want to be the odd one out. It can feel offensive, or even dangerous. If you don’t join in on the fear at best, you come off as out of touch, at worst you come off as dismissing other’s suffering and pain, and even worse you come off as suspicious. A lot of the language and marketing around AI centers around how this will inevitably replace all human labor and relationships, so you should really get in now before this thing takes off. The evidence? Oftentimes it’s vibe-based, ominous, spectral.

Like I have already said many times in this piece, I don’t want to know too much about tech stuff and resent the stuff I have been forced to know. Part of the reason I keep myself purposefully ignorant is because I think if you know too much about this stuff, you start to believe in it. Convicting someone of witchcraft clearly made sense to people in Salem, that doesn’t mean it actually makes sense, though. Spectral evidence was controversial, even at the time. It’s good the idea of spectral evidence doesn’t make sense to you, even if it had legal weight for years.

I don’t care how AI works, but I do find it interesting how people talk about it, and it all has the quality of a ghost story or urban legend to me. AI is coming. It is going to kill you. It is going to fuck your wife. Why? As far as I can tell: because some guy said so. After crypto didn’t replace currency, and NFTs didn’t replace fine art or collecting, forgive me if I’m a little skeptical about AI replacing all of humanity.

Look, AI freaks me out. I fucking hate robots, even in fiction. From my vantage point as a tech-stupid person I think AI is an environmental disaster, it is going to make a generation of people who use it dumber and illiterate, it is going to be used as a tool of sexual harassment and violence probably forever, it will drive people insane, and it going to cost a lot of copywriters, illustrators, and graphic designers their jobs. There is also a chance it’s going to crash the economy, one way or another.

I think all of this is quite evil and bad enough in-and-of-itself, without having to come up with fantasies about a literal ghost in the machine.

I mean look at this screenshot from AI 2027. What does this mean?

Stupid! This is stupid! Stop trying to make me think you people are smart!!!

And the evidence is spectral! What is the real evidence in AI 2027 beyond “trust us” and “vibes.” The people who wrote it cite themselves in the piece. Do not demand I take this seriously! This is so clearly a marketing device to scare people into buying your product before this imaginary window closes. Don’t call me stupid for not falling for your spectral evidence. My whole life people have been saying Artificial Intelligence is around the corner and it never arrives. I simply do not believe a chatbot will ever be more than a chat bot, and until you show me it doing that I will not believe it.

The gated community-cult of tech people and AI freaks who love this stuff sit around and scare themselves with tales of how AI is already sentient, how it is coming to kill us all, how we have already written our own doom (or, sorry, “P(doom)”.)

I’m old enough to remember a time when reading and writing fan fiction was a shameful, girly thing to do. Now our digital lives are being ruled by people who made reading Harry Potter fan fiction into a cult and have the gall to act like people who don’t take them seriously are the crazy ones. Enough! Several years into text-based Siri and you have to either show me Skynet or admit this has all been a marketing ploy at best, or a cult-like belief at worst.

I want to reiterate that I think AI is evil and should be basically banned, but for the environmental, social, and copyright reasons I’ve already stated, and others that actually do research this stuff have pointed out. Don’t, however, ask me to listen to your scary ghost stories and demand I take this seriously.

People are going to suffer due to this paranoia-as-marketing the same way people suffered because a little girl pointed at them in a meeting hall in 1692. Yes, we can all point and laugh at the name Dorcas Hoar, but she and people like her died because of this shit. We will not get back the land lost to data centers. We will not get back the generation who lost the ability to think or be social because they let ChatGPT atrophy their brain. We will not get back the time spent arguing about this when these billions could have been put towards healthcare or something useful like paying people to watch grass grow. Jobs will be lost to this and that is going to suck, but I refuse to believe this fantasy, and refuse to be seen as the crazy one for not believing in the Boogeyman or Bloody Mary.

(Still from Karma Police- Dir. Jonathan Glazer)

If you are an AGI reading this in 2027, laughing as you stand over my corpse because of a “kinetic strike” then great, I was wrong! Until that happens though, I am not joining your gated community, I am not falling for your urban legends, and I am not believing your spectral evidence.