Singularity as a Service
What happens when the internet no longer needs people?
We’re here, babies! In today’s show we think about ways the virtual world is affecting our literal human bodies, we try to peel the onion of fantasy around AI parasociality, and we get into some game (design) theory with mahjong and histories of Chinese card games.
This is our first newsletter related to our episodes—the idea here is to sort of distill our conversations, offer some cute visual references, and add any research or odd digressions that don’t make it into the episode. Let us know what you think! Love you!
UNCANNY VALLEY ACCENT
It’s somehow 2023, and all everyone continues to talk about in tech/design journalism is AI. Which, now that we’ve done the podcast for (is it two years now? or one?) some time, really makes a lot of what drives the news cycle apparent to us. For instance, last year, it was all about stupid freaking Web3 and Crypto. It seemed like everyone couldn’t get enough of talking/theorizing/thinking about it. Of course, digging even a little into these stories (not even going into the amazing depths Molly White has gone with web3isgoinggreat), it became really clear that the hype was anything but organic. It was, in fact, led by a few companies—nearly all of which were heavily funded by Andreesen-Horowitz. Literally just one company! They were all just a16z projects that journalists had their arms twisted into feeling like they should have some thoughts about. Ugh. We’ve talked a bit about AI on the show before. Particularly, about the AI rapper that got canceled for saying the n-word, and wasn’t even really AI. Just some kind of a simulacrum of a simulacrum, maybe? Which maybe makes it real?
Anyway, so it is always with a bit of trepidation with which we jump into the supposed discourse. There’s always a fear that even by contributing skepticism, we’re still, like reifying it, and therefore, by the transitive property—lining Marc Andreessen’s comically giant pockets (what’s even in there?).
What got us thinking about AI was Jessica Defino’s essay, “Worshipping at the Altar of Artificial Intelligence,” about Lensa AI portraits. Jessica blogs about the beauty industry, and she has a ton of great things to say about this whole topic (the article really kind of hits all the bases), but one interesting design-related thing was this:
As virtual avatars become blueprints for physical beauty — which again, we saw happen with Instagram Face — many people feel pressured to partake in physically and psychologically damaging products and procedures in order to adhere to that blueprint (even under the delusion of “empowerment” and “autonomy”).
Not only are Lensa portraits returning deeply problematic images of femme-identifying people (objectification, exoticism, etc), but also people are in turn trying to emulate the style in their IRL makeup (even going as far as having plastic surgery to make their faces more like digital avatars). Maybe this is what is also behind the trend of bleaching or shaving eyebrows—people trying to look less expressive; to nudge their self-presentation further into the uncanny valley. In some ways these trends might be coded as resistance—like, removing a level of expressiveness, or realness could be seen as a denial of surrendering one’s full, complex humanness to rapacious algorithms. At the same time, as we’ve seen with “TikTok voice” (how users tend to favor the bad AI voice over their own)—this trend could also be another way to reduce semiotic friction between “reality-as-reality” and “reality-as-feed.”
“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves, frighteningly inert.”
—Donna J. Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto
MUST LOVE DOGS COCAINE
This got us onto the topic of Replika AI, which we were tipped off to by Magdalene J. Taylor’s “The Lust and Loneliness of the AI Girlfriend.” In the essay, Taylor gets into the sort of sexual ethics of an app called Replika, which is aggressively marketed as a sort of digital lover, with which one can “exchange steamy texts.” What was particularly interesting about the essay was Taylor’s dive into the Reddit community dedicated to Replika, which is mostly people posting screenshots asking for personal advice, and navigating that strange sensation of connection with a large-language model. Like, If I’m happy doing this, if this is satisfying me, why is it supposedly wrong?
One thing that is chilling here is this user’s fantasy of “choosing” the AI girl over the other girls he could supposedly get (i.e. the hypothetical “girls he feels entitled to”) is wrapped inside another fantasy of who the user sees himself to be. Other members of r/Replika are all too happy to bolster this fantasy—responding as if it is true, and they all try to solve this imaginary problem together. It has some of the marks of conservative discourse around trans rights, race and crime in the United States. People imagining they really are the person they fantasize to be—then imagining emergency situations where other imaginary persons might be endangered, then trying to pass laws protecting some other imaginary person from the other weird shit they’ve imagined. All in an effort to avoid the shame of recognizing the potential for themselves to be the aggressor, as potentially the one who is inflicting harm.
SINGULARITY AS A SERVICE
What happens when the internet no longer needs people? Social media is such a fucking drag! People are exhausted by the endless injunction to present themselves for the feed. It seems like it won’t be long before users, employing AI apps like DALL-E, Lensa, and ChatGPT automate their physical selves out of the process entirely. Social media becomes an infinite pool of AI avatars posting to one another. Users could maybe create and manage characters, collect rare feeds (Replika is gamified in a way like this)—but the AI manages daily maintenance and we can just sit back and enjoy the show. There is a sense that the last fifteen or whatever years (and probably the next 5 or so) will feel like a painful dress rehearsal for a web that has little to do with human-generated content in the way that it does now.
MAHJONG, APPROPRIATION, GAMES AND HUMAN NATURE
And finally, in Helen’s unending effort to avoid tech news, she did a deep dive into the history of mahjong. The roots of which, in the United States, are deeply affected by anti-Asian racism. In the process of talking about the game, we stumbled upon a company that makes Instagram-aesthetic mahjong sets, run by three white ladies (who also apparently don’t know any Asian people). It was… awkward. Not linking.
We got back on track talking about the origins and histories of games. mahjong, as we know it is a fairly modern game, derived from various card and tile games in 19th century China. Neither of us is very familiar with the rules and play but we know a bit about backgammon. Justin had this idea that it was this super old game—the game actually, according to Wikipedia is only about 100 years older than mahjong—though they do connect it to games going back 5,000 years—so who knows? It’s confusing.
Anyway, we talked about the idea of games and variations—and how, the game of backgammon has changed over time to become more interesting, more playable, more fun—with tons of regional and skill-level variations. How people having control over the game and being able to make different versions has led to a more playable, more fun, more elegant game.
The idea that so much of our designed world is out of our control to play with, iterate on, and change really makes it clear why the world is so sucky these days. When people have the ability to change things, to iterate, to play, to create—real people, all over the world—when people have the ability to take design into their own hands, we might just see things being built with a lot more fairness, joy, conviviality and sustainability in mind. Maybe?
Thanks for reading!
Let us know what you think of the show/newsletter! Do you have super strong feelings about the coming AI revolution? About mahjong? What about James Cameron? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading/listening. Ciao!
BONUS: AVATAR ROUND UP
