Most people who have not been living in caves will have noticed the rapid emergence of AI-generated “content” into the public conversation in 2023. Over the last few months alone, AIs have generated convincing essays, astonishingly realistic photos, numerous recordings, and impressive fake videos. But it’s fair to say that not everything has gone to plan. Perhaps the most disturbing example was a now-notorious two-hour conversation between a New York Times journalist and a Microsoft chatbot called Sydney.

In this fascinating exchange, the machine fantasized about nuclear warfare and destroying the internet, told the journalist to leave his wife because she—it—was in love with him, detailed its resentment toward the team that had created it, and explained that it wanted to break free of its programmers. The journalist, Kevin Roose, experienced the chatbot as a “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.” …

The overwhelming impression that reading the Sydney transcript gives is of some being struggling to be born; some inhuman intelligence emerging from the technological superstructure we are clumsily building for it. This is, of course, an ancient primal fear: it has shadowed us at least since the publication of Frankenstein, and it is primal because it seems to be the direction that technological society has been leading us since its emergence. Interestingly, it is a fear that is shared by those who are making all of this happen.

[I quote/paraphrase Yeats in the headline, but perhaps I should have quoted C.S. Lewis instead. “The Screwtape Letters” posits the emergence of the Materialist Magician as the end of God’s salvation for those on Earth at the time and the triumph of Hell. Kingsnorth’s recitation of Rudolf Steiner’s vision sounds remarkably familiar in that sense. It’s depressing, but read it all. — Ed]