“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” ― Fake Ivan Illich

“Technology is not an instrument. It is a form of life.” ― Fake Ivan Illich

“A society that doesn’t care about people doesn’t know how to use machines well.” ― Fake Ivan Illich

“The first thing that technology gave us was greater strength. Then it gave us greater speed. Now it promises us greater intelligence. But always at the cost of meaninglessness.” ― Fake Ivan Illich

…I could do this all day. I generated more than 365 fake quotes in the style of philosopher/theologian Ivan Illich by feeding a page’s worth of real Illich quotes from [GoodReads.com] (https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/36507.Ivan_Illich) into OpenAI’s massive language model, GPT-3 [1], and had it continue “writing” from there. The wonder of GPT-3 is that it exhibits what its authors describe as “few-shot learning”: Rather than needing 100+ pages of Illich as prior models might have, I can get away with sending in as few as 2 to 8 Illich quotes and GPT-3 can take it from there, with a high degree of believability.

Have I resurrected Illich? Am I putting words into the mouth of Illich, now dead for nearly 20 years? Would he (or the guardians of his estate) approve? The answers to these questions are: No, Explicitly not (via my use of the word “Fake”), and Almost certainly not. Even generating them started to feel “icky” after a bit. Perhaps someone with as flamboyant a public persona as Marshall McLuhan would have been pleased to be – what shall we say, “re-animated”? [2] – in such a fashion, but Illich likely would have recoiled. At least, such is the intuition of myself and noted Illich [scholar? enthusiast?] L.M. Sacasas, who inspired my initial foray into creating an “IllichBot”:

…and while I haven’t abandoned IllichBot entirely, Sacasas and I both feel that it would be better if it posted real Illich quotes rather than fake rehashes via GPT-3 or some other model.

For the AI Theology blog, I was not asked to write about IllichBot, but rather about the project of AI creating Nirvana music [3] in a project called Lost Tapes of the 27 Club [4].

…Reanimation rarely goes well, as in Frankenstein [5] and Pet Sematary [6]…

The title is an homage to [7]

Note also Kneer [8]

[1] T. B. Brown, B. Mann, N. Ryder, M. Subbiah, J. Kaplan, P. Dhariwal, A. Neelakantan, P. Shyam, G. Sastry, A. Askell, S. Agarwal, A. Herbert-Voss, G. Krueger, T. Henighan, R. Child, A. Ramesh, D. M. Ziegler, J. Wu, C. Winter, C. Hesse, M. Chen, E. Sigler, M. Litwin, S. Gray, B. Chess, J. Clark, C. Berner, S. McCandlish, A. Radford, I. Sutskever, & D. Amodei, "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners," ArXiv (2020).

[2] H. P. Lovecraft, D. Paoli, W. Norris, & S. Gordon, Re-animator (Empire Pictures, 1985).

[3] K. Grow, "In Computero: Hear How AI Software Wrote a ‘New’ Nirvana Song," Rolling Stone (2021).

[4] "Lost Tapes of the 27 Club: Using AI to create the album lost to music’s mental health crisis," (n.d.).

[5] M. W. Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus: the 1818 text (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[6] M. Lambert & S. King, Pet Sematary (1989).

[7] E. M. Bender, T. Gebru, A. McMillan-Major, & S. Shmitchell, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜," Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021), pp. 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

[8] E. S. Mikalonytė & M. Kneer, "Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art? Folk Intuitions as to whether AI-driven Robots Can Be Viewed as Artists and Produce Art," (2021). https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30328.57602.

(c) 2020 Scott H. Hawley