Authoritarianism, generative AI, and the war against reality

 

Quis evadet?  

- Hendrick Goltzius, 1594 

In the past three years, generative AI has infected daily life on a destructive scale. It is a topic that I do not like thinking about, far less writing about, but as so many other scholars working in the humanities, I feel forced into having more or less coherent opinions about why this is something I would rather avoid having an opinion about. There are many reasons, and given time and rage I could write lengthy expositions about each reason. The present blogpost is a rather short tirade, but it hits at one of the key reasons why generative AI both fills me with loathing and also why I feel the need to opine. 

As with so much contemporary technology, generative AI is a gift to perverts and authoritarians - a Venn diagram that is essentially a complete circle - in that it allows its users to bring their inner desires into some kind of life. With AI image generators, prompts can be used to put together collages of obsessions, whether it comes in the shape of apotheosising portraits of their heroes, or naked, sexualised images of individuals over whom they obsess. Typically, these generated images depict things that do not exist, and that cannot exist. This is in and of itself not a problem, since so much of the history of art does exactly that. The problem with AI generated images, however, is that the non-existent things depicted in them serve as weapons in the war which authoritarians are waging on reality. 

One of the key drivers in the promotion of generative AI in society at large is that it can give you things that are impossible. Did your favourite TV show get cancelled? AI can generate new episodes for you. Did your favourite author die? AI can generate new books in their style. Did a loved one die? AI can generate a digital simulacrum for your comfort. Do you want to have sex with a famous person? AI can generate proof that you have done so, with which you might end up convincing yourself that you really have fulfilled that particular fantasy in real life. 

Aside from the individual goals of such desires, this kind of marketing also speaks to something far darker - even though what I have sketched up here is dark as Hell already - and that is a refusal to accept the confines of reality. This technology thrive on the fact that there are some people - often rich, spoiled, and morally, emotionally and intellectually vapid - who do not accept the fundamental tenet of reality, namely that each and every created thing comes to an end. This is one of the great tragedies of human existence, but that is also precisely why the knowledge of things and people being transitory is such an important motivator for cultivating what one finds worth loving and treasuring. The trope from art history known as 'memento mori', a reminder of one's mortality, need not be a heavy load on one's shoulder, but can be channelled into an appreciation of all that is good and enjoyable in this life. But not being able to face mortality means that people try to cheat, escape or avoid their inevitable demise. Generative AI allows these people to think they can actually succeed. 

Not all those who are driven to use generative AI out of fear of reality can be called authoritarians. Some are just immature without the added emptiness of authoritarianism. But authoritarian projects are typically at odds with the fact of death, and so much of authoritarianism is fuelled by the idea that it is possible to treat death as something that happens only to other people. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it is so easy for authoritarians to inflict pain, suffering and death on others. In any case, a mind unrestrained by the fear of ceasing to exist is dangerous because it is unbridled by an awareness of the confines of reality. Therefore, that mind feels free to unleash impossible projects that through their very impossibility are extremely destructive. Generative AI is such a project, but it is also the tool by which the project is carried out. By generating science-looking texts to support whatever one wants to have supported, by generating images that ultimately defy the very possibility of verification and creates a halfworld where truth and lies are irrelevant entities, by creating visual proof for oneself that what lives in the mind is also alive in the material world, authoritarians of the present moment are well placed for convincing themselves and those around them about the possibility and realism of their ideas and their projects. But ultimately, these generated things are all just parts of an ongoing effort to undo reality - if only in the collective mind and conviction - so that authoritarians have a free pass to do whatever their warped minds have become convinced of. 

This is just one of the reasons that I despise generative AI, but it is one of the most important ones. It is also one of the many reasons why this technology needs to be undone.  

Quis evadet (who escapes it)

- Hendrick Goltzius, 1594 

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, inventory no.: 51.501.4929)

Histories from home, part 7 - the shapes of history

 

This year, I have been working quite a bit on the history of my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords. While I have always been interested in local history, and while I have absorbed much of it in the course of my lifetime, this year marks the 150th anniversary for the consecration of the modern parish church (for more on this, see this blogpost). Due to this milestone, I have been writing pieces for the local parish magazine, looking at different aspects of our church history broadly understood.  

As a friend and I were on a mission to take some photographs for my next piece, I was once again struck by the shape that history takes in the fjords. Because I come from a small village - described in one medieval document as the poorest parish of the area - there are very few written sources that shed light on the numerous lives that have been lived in these valleys and along this fjord. As a historian, I am mainly used to written sources, often combined with a piece of art or a building, or some kind of archaeological remains. These are the familiar shapes that history takes in my work. But as I have immersed myself more in the history of a place where such sources are rare, I have had to look more carefully at other shapes as well. 

Since my latest piece for the parish magazine focused on how people travelled to church from 1876 onwards, I had to look at the roads that cut through the two valleys of the village. In one valley, the first road was built in the 1860s, just before the invention of dynamite, and this one was superseded by the current road which was built in the period 1923-40. We know the dates, and there are still some second-hand memories which have been transmitted orally down to the present. But to understand how everyday life in the village was affected by these roads, it is necessary to see them in the landscape, even though that landscape has often changed dramatically in the intervening years. In short, one of the shapes that history takes in my native village is that of a road. And I have spent a lot of time this year trying to become better acquainted with that particular shape of our past. 

The first plum harvest of the season

 

Two days ago, August 29, I gathered the first plum harvest of the season. Having grown up on a farm, all such first-fruits of any particular type of produce are significant, especially because they provide historical reference points to be compared with those of previous years. Farming has always entailed this kind of chronography. It is a kind that often goes unrecorded, and with the passing of years they tend to blur into one another, leaving only the most remarkable times - whether remarkably late or remarkably early - as fixtures by which to measure future harvests. 

For most of my life, the first-fruits of the numerous berries and other produce which we harvest in my family have not been recorded, at least not systematically. As the climate is changing, however, these various firsts and lasts of the agrarian year take on a historical weight they did not previously have, as the old pattern is now breaking and it remains an open question whether it will be replaced by a new pattern or something more of a chaos. 

The present blogpost, therefore, is simply to provide some kind of record for the present year - if only when it comes to plums, as there have already been numerous other harvests. As a historian, I am used to wading through sources in order to create sense of the past. However, the changes of the present time also reminds me from time to time that I should also be a historian in the non-academic sense, namely a chronographer. I have tried on and off, and I know myself well enough to suspect that the present blogpost will not be the beginning of an elaborate and important historical record. But as a historian, I also know that even such glimpses as provided by one such report can have significance and value. This post, therefore, is both a celebration of the first plum harvest, and a record for comparison in later years. 

The Midgard serpent on another planet - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 8

 

Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement 

- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication 

I forget who first made this point, but the monsters of science fiction and stories about space travel are ultimately drawn from the monsters of the classical and medieval imaginations, transposed to a new frontier once the Earth had been mapped and all continents were known to the map-makers. As a consequence, numerous stories set in space contain recognisable elements from medieval narratives. A quick glance at the front pages of science fiction magazines, for instance, will show many variations on the theme of male hero rescues a woman from a monster. This is the typical damsel in distress, which had many configurations throughout the Latin Middle Ages, and the most enduring iconographical depiction came in the pictorial narratives of Saint George rescuing Princess Alexandra from the dragon. In its turn, this particular story also owed much to Perseus rescuing Andromeda, as well as other similar tales. Space medievalism, therefore, is a fruitful topic of study, and one that I hope will see much more focus in the coming years. 

Recently, I was reminded of this transposition of imaginary beings to worlds beyond our own planet. I have been reading the Norwegian comic book Ingeniør Knut Berg (Engineer Knut Berg), which was created in 1941, in the second year of the Nazi occupation of the country. The comic was written by Hallvard Sandnes (whose pen name was Vigleik Vikli) and drawn by Jostein Øvrelid (whose pen name was Ronald Stone). The series recounts the adventures of the eponymous protagonist, his fiancé Aima - princess of the utopian country Kalimanko located in East Central Asia - and their companions. Starting out as an earthbound picaresque narrative with elements of science fiction, the adventures were eventually brought into space. Notable sources of inspiration include Flash Gordon and Lost Horizon. 

The comic was - and still is - written in Nynorsk, a written language more often associated with traditional poetry, hymns, and lyrical descriptions of nature than with technological fantasies. To me - as a writer in Nynorsk - it is delightful to see what are now very old-fashioned words and turns of phrase used alongside robots and spaceships.  

This being a Norwegian comic, its world is necessarily described through the Norwegian cultural frame of references. Perhaps the best example of how this frame of reference affects the interpretation of the new discoveries on distant planets can be found in albums 14 and 15, which were published in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Here, Knut Berg's spaceship approaches the unknown reaches of the planet Uri, where he and his companions suddenly encounter a sea-beast rising its head through the water. In order to express the consternation of the interplanetary travellers, the narrator states that the beast looked like nothing on earth, and the closest would be the legend of the Midgard serpent. According to Norse mythology, this serpent - Jormungand - encircled the world, and would kill, and be killed by, the god Thor at Ragnarok. 

The beast reminiscent of the Midgard serpent is a reminder that the new is typically interpreted or imagined through the old. In order to describe what has hitherto not been seen, it is necessary to fall back on the familiar images and names. It is this mechanism that has brought the names and stories of old worlds into new ones, and the reason why - for instance - there is a Pacific Island nation named the Solomon islands, or the figure of Santiago Matamoros became Santiago Mataindios in Latin America. Space. This kind of transposition - of filtering the information from one world through a frame of reference belonging to a different world - is both common and unexpected. But because it is so common, it is also easily forgotten. Consequently, we easily forget that we understand the new and the unknown imperfectly, because we force it into a framework that was not built for what we are encountering. Studying this mechanism means that we become less arrogant in our meetings with new information, and better disposed to understand that which is new on its own terms. 

The king shot an arrow - a runic inscription from Sogndal, Norway

 

Last weekend, I made a roadtrip through parts of Sogn, a district that covers both the northern and southern shores and inlands of Sognefjorden, the largest fjord in mainland Norway. This is an area which contains a lot of historical survivals that are of great interest to a medievalist, and in some upcoming blogposts I will write about some of the many medieval monuments encountered along the way. 

The first example is a rune stone from Sogndal, which currently is housed in a glass case. We do not know when the stone was first erected, and what it was meant to commemorate. The inscription is known by its ID number N 386, and a transcription and a translation into English can be found here. It is dated to around 1100, and reads "King Olaf shot between these stones". The text indicates that there once stood a second standing stone in the area, but this is now lost. 

The text does not give any indication of which king is referenced. By c.1100, there had been three kings of Norway named Olaf. Closest in time to the inscription is Olaf III (r.1067-93), whereas Olaf II (r.1015-28) and Olaf I (r.995-1000) had long since become legendary figures about whom many stories were told. Olaf II had also been recognised as a saint since 1031, the year after his death at the Battle of Stiklestad. 

The reference to a shot - presumably with an arrow - is difficult to explain. One hypothesis is that the king shot an arrow in order to decide on a place where a church should be built. The rune stone - or rather, the standing stone with a runic inscription added later - stands close to the location of Stedje Church, a nineteenth-century replacement for the stave church that stood on the same spot in the Middle Ages. Decisions being left to divine intervention or fate such as this one are a typical motif of folktales and medieval hagiography alike. Since both Olaf I and Olaf II were regarded as missionary kings, stories about the founding of churches were often attributed to them. 

What is particularly important about the runic inscription, however, is not whether it refers to the founding of a church or whether it has a different meaning. Rather, the inscription shows that already by c.1100, stories that connected famous but departed kings to a specific locality were already in circulation close to a century after the oldest of the three possible candidates. The story might have been based on old oral accounts, perhaps even an actual historical event, but decades - perhaps an entire century - had passed before someone saw the need to commit this story to writing. As a medium for this message, the carver decided to use an old standing stone that was central to the story, but which had not been erected for the sake of carrying the kind of monumental memorialisation that is typical for rune stones. In short, the inscription provides a glimpse into the evolution of stories that grow and develop outside centralised, authoritative text production, which by c.1100 was mainly overseen by ecclesiastical and monastic groups.  

The person carving these runes might have remembered Olaf III, and it is possible that it was this king who ordered a church to be founded. After all, new churches were built by both secular and ecclesiastical agents throughout the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. However, it is likely that the kind of church-building story most likely to be committed to written memory would concern a church erected in the early Christianisation period, i.e. during the reign of either Olaf I or Olaf II. If so, this would be an event taking place long before the carver of the runes had been born. In this case, the inscription shows the pull of stories, and how these stories - and perhaps also their implication for local identity - excite people and move them to become keepers of memory in one way or another. In this instance, by carving runes on an old menhir.

All in all, we can only speculate about the origins of this runic inscription. Its content suggests to us the importance of history and the desire to commemorate the past. Seen in the context of other written records from eleventh and twelfth-century Norway, we might understand this as a part of a growing concern with fastening history to the material world in order to preserve it for future generations. The inscription is, in other words, a testament to the importance of stories.  

The Stedje stone looking towards Stedje Church

Centuries of history in one picture

The old adage about a picture saying more than a thousand words sometimes rings true with particular force. As I was walking my youngest sister's dog this morning, I was struck by how a simple matter of perspective and framing could serve to summarise centuries of history in a single picture. This happened as we walked the typical route on our shorter walks, which takes us along the innermost bay of the fjord and to one of the rivers that runs into the fjord at its southernmost point. I have seen the views along this route more times than I can count, and I know its various details well enough to recognise any seasonal changes or any oddities that appear. Today, however, I nonetheless noticed, as if for the first time, that at one of the angles along the route, the history of life in the fjords became telescoped into a single contrast. This view is shown in the picture below. In the foreground is an old boathouse which is now on the verge of collapsing. The boathouse itself is not that old - probably only from the mid-1900s - but it represent the kind of infrastructure and the type of wooden boats that were the main mode of fishing and transport for the better part of the past millennium. 

On the other side of the fjord is a shipwright. This was founded in the 1950s, and it is currently one of Norway's leading producers of carbon fibre hulls, focusing mainly on vessels for transport and tourism in the Norwegian fjords. This shipwright grew out of the older tradition of building wooden boats, but represents a new technological reality which is far removed from the framework in which this tradition emerged.  

My paternal grandmother used to say that her generation - she was born in 1912 - was the one generation who had witnessed the most significant changes in the course of one lifetime. Since become a professional historian, I have had many opportunities to see the truth of this, but few times have this truth become more apparent in a single picture such as this one. 

 

The Stiklestad sanctuary ring

This week, I have been in Stiklestad and Trondheim for work, since this is the Saint Olaf festival which culminates on July 29, and which is celebrated in both these places. The festival celebrations at Stiklestad included several very interesting talks, one of which concerned a door ring which was most likely produced locally in the twelfth century. Such rings are often referred to as sanctuary rings, since those who held on to the ring and asked for sanctuary had the right to receive it. 

The iconography of the ring is typical of the period, but the exact meaning of the various components remains uncertain. The serpents that have latched on to the crossbeam by which the ring is fastened to the plate with serrated edge are common representations of evil. However, they also represent the kind of cunning that Christ adviced his disciples to imitate in their preaching, so that they would know when to leave a place due to hostility. The human head with its cleft beard might be seen as representing those that seek sanctuary, captured as it is by the evil of the temporal world. Yet the head might also represent uncivilised, evil people, as long beards are often found among the so-called beard-pullers, which are humans representing heathendom in medieval art. 

The ring is, in short, at one and the same time legible and illegible to us. We understand its function, we are familiar with the individual iconographical elements, but we do not have the knowledge to put those elements into the kind of semiotic totality that would have been well-known among those who might one day have need of such a ring. This beautiful piece of metalwork and craft is, therefore, another reminder that some types of understanding lie just beyond our reach because those things we seek to understand are no longer part of our everyday world.