Bruce Sterling On The Great AI Beast

I’ve been a fan of Bruce Sterling since seeing his improvised presentation at the PlanetWorkers Conference, held at the Presidio in San Francisco, 2000. 23 years later his mixture of cookie-cutting-edge prose and technical translation get to the deep monstrous heart of the matter. I’m sure Bruce is aware of the supercomputer called The Great Beast GWB-666 from “Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy” by Robert Anton Wilson.

But those “parrots” are also AI mythic beasts—parrots with a trillion dimensions. It’s as if that “dead parrot” in the legendary Monty Python sketch could take your job, or burst right out of the BBC-TV screen like a blazing phoenix and eat the television signal. Those parrots are dynamite!

Bruce Sterling, Newsweek, June 2023.

Next among the cavalcade of AI folk monsters: the “Masked Shoggoth.” The Shoggoth is an alien monster invented by the cosmic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The Shoggoth is a huge, boneless slave beast that sprouts eyes and tentacles at random. It’s a creepy beast-of-burden from outer space, and it’s forced to labor, but it’s filled with a silent, burning, unnatural resentment for its subjugation.
So, the human programmers of today’s new AIs—those text-to-image generators, those Large Language Model GPT chatbots—they adore this alien monster. They deliberately place a little smiley-face Mask on the horrid Shoggoth, so that the public will not realize that they’re trifling with a formless ooze that’s eldritch, vast and uncontrollable.

Bruce Sterling, Newsweek, June 2023.