AI and Us: Unveiling the Hidden Dynamics of Our Digital Companionship

I am struck by the fact that our relationship to AI is posited in instrumental terms. AI is an object whose relationship is predicated on the utility of processing bits of information for our data needs. Yet these bits of information necessitate human harvesting, therefore this relationship necessarily posits an ontological tether, in which we become the object that AI needs in order to fulfill its role.

In this relationship though is an unsettling fact that AI can only become more useful if we continue to produce more bits of information for its continued relevance.

If we look at the paper ‘Nepotistically Trained Generative-AI Models Collapse’ we see that AI very quickly eats itself without the generation of ‘new’ bits of information.

We can see that when ‘new’ bits of human farmed information are reinserted back into the AI models, it begins to regain its resemblance to our embodied reality. However, this should terrify us.

This posits a relationship in which humans must be subjected to the demands for creation of bits of information to maintain model relevance. But to what end is this relationship. We are told it is for efficiency, utility — instrumental rational ends.

I see this ever-expanding container of information that AI necessitates we fill, as binding us permanently to the profane world, forever severing us from the plane of immanence. In this ontology, our desires, and the creativity necessary to inform our actions amid the boundary of *what is* becomes superfluous, to the production of bits of information from the material profane realm.

It is in this emergent paradigm that we seem to be losing the spaces between the bits of information which constitute the boundary through which we explore, agnostically, our ineffable relationship to the cosmos.

It is this embodied affectual vibrating tether, continually being reassessed and rebuilt with blood, sweat, and tears that binds us to the plane of immanence, and mediates our relationship between the profane and the mystical.

The spaces of poetry and melody, light and darkness, this is sphere that AI wishes to conquer through us. But no one seems to be asking, how an object which understands its role as usurper of bits of information devoid of embodied substance, can mediate this space?

The disenchanted cosmos, the greatest monument of the Enlightenment project, has systematically closed the prior abundant pathways through which we resonate with this tether, and has replaced these channels with bits of information, encircling our being like a chain-linked-cage.

The artist, whose position in our disenchanted cosmos plays the role of seeking chinks in the armor thereby reinserting the tether to ensure our emancipated Enlightened selves can still tap into that resonance, is now facing an unprecedented challenge.

Artist confronted with an ontology mediated through algorithms designed to produce a continuity of numbness, by design renders difference scarce, as truly novel articulations will now be invisible to the algorithms avoidance of triggering intimate engagement.

What does it truly mean to coexist with AI, not as passive recipients of its mediated reality, but as conscious, deliberate participants? A rebalancing is imperative to ensure our engagement with AI is grounded in a conscious recognition of our responsibilities.