Michael E. Locasto

Given (1) these recent performative rituals where each AI company is claiming "our AI hacker broke containment, too!" and (2) the recent statements from the CEOs of Meta and Anthropic, it's worth producing the full text of the essay below. --- There is something grotesque unfolding before our eyes. It is the enthusiasm with which humans are setting about to fail the Turing Test as its putative proctors and administrators. It is the wish to be fooled. It is the childish tendency to delight in shallow magic. It is the impulse to be titillated and distracted. It is an abdication of living real life. I see this growing mistake creeping into every discussion, every post, every mention or description of interaction with this AI construct. People peer into the abyss and imagine that it stares back. They are transfixed like a rabbit before a cobra. They see what they wish to see, what they yearn for: companionship, subservience, and power forged in a single entity. They see a House Elf. There is real power and temptation here. I understand this error to arise as a consequence of a first move that was so fast that you missed it. The chiefs of the AI world started by controlling the basic metaphor. They introduced the world to their invention by making it wear a skin suit. They said: "think of this as a helpful research assistant." In other words, think of it as a person; overlay all your apish preconceptions about social interaction on this thing. They hijacked words like "thinking", "agent", "chat", and "hallucination." We accepted this metaphor blindly, continued it frivolously, and have cemented it unthinkingly. This pattern debases us, and that is why I say it is grotesque. Metaphor as Temptation to Lies Give the Devil his due - this interaction mode is most of the actual magic, and it is very powerful and useful. It lowers the engagement barrier for non-programmers to connect to a kind of generative logic loop at the expense of tremendous wastes of energy and computation. We can describe what we want in plain English, and like a B- student, the machine generates something approximately worthwhile to work with. Fine. What disturbs me is that I have seen multiple times where the symbol generator spews a few well chosen words, and the hapless dupe bemusedly reports on their own emotional reaction to this jumble of machine-generated syllables. "Oh, Claude, you silly thing!", "Oh, Gemini, there you go again." As if it were a dog or a small child. You, you fool are layering it gowning it beclothing it gracing it with meaning and dignity. Why do you give in to this pretense? Giving the machine credit in this way is a small act of self-harm in which you devalue human existence and defile your own being. You are making a mistake in thinking that because you chat to it in a mode that is natural for us, the thing receiving that input stream is like us. It is in no way like you. It is not a helpful companion or dutiful research assistant. Do you love a hammer? What about a gun, or a sailing ship? Are you a mariner’s wife, that you should imbue it with the personality of a minor demigod as a form of prayer for safe return? No? Then desist. AI contains no more soul than does a fast food paper bag. To you haughty tech elites robed in snobbish atheism: who now is engaged in wish fulfillment and praying to placate the Invisible? Adjust the aim of your derision. The devout have a firmer place to stand than do you. Think of it not as an assistant who can mimic the forms and patterns of turn-taking conversation. Rather, think of it as what it is. It is a stern white rectangle of metal, some acres on a side. Picture this sprawling shed full of blinking blue and yellow lights and the numbing hum of fans. Here now is a better metaphor: these droning black racks of machines are filled with endless strings of yarn and crayon linking letters, words, and phrases across all of digitized (and stolen) human output. That is your AI: a legion of mindless imps operating a kaleidoscope. There is no intent, no purpose, no volition, no value system, no motive power. I say this not because I wish you to have an irrational fear of this contraption, nor to shortchange its very real computational power, but so that you see more clearly its soulless nature, its inner chaos. It is a whirling series of chalkboards on a complicated contortion of gears perched on top of a library. A library, if I may be so impolite to repeat, that was stolen from us. Here we find the first sin: a theft in which the thief proclaims: your words are now ours. The second sin a lie: pretend this thing is a human. So now we have in view a foundation mortared together with two sins. Might there be a third? Oh yes: it robs you at each interaction, and you pay for the pleasure! All your words, all your thoughts, all your files and data siphoned to puff up this carcass. Leeches at least become satiated. Vampires must disappear with the dawn. This self-employed swindler is ever present. So there is your third sin: armed usury. Might a fourth lurk if we look further? Does the Law of Induction suggest an unending series of errors and fouls stretching from root to branch to fruit of this new species of tree? Who are the planters, the people behind this thing, and what evidence do we have they are at all interested in our welfare? Most of these would-be Titans are merely derivative demons. Having renounced the Sky God, they instead seek with longing the Ghost in the holy machine. Why are we all so willing to assume broad competence and wisdom from people whose stated goals are trans-humanism and whose life experience is extremely limited? We will revisit that issue at some later point. So here we have a miracle that arrives robed with untruth and garlanded with lies. Should we be complicit? Can it be redeemed? No - we should not be complicit. As we learned in the great Wuhan Coronavirus breakdown of 2019—2024, there is no ready-made brake, no existing counter-force, no external savior — nothing except our own bravery and backbone scaffolding our refusal to be ruled. By 'complicit', I mean responsible for permitting the untruths about the essence of AI to continue unchallenged. In an age of hypocrisy and manufactured reality, the essence of rebellion is to observe and share what you see with your own eyes. People have a real thirst to know what this thing is, how it works, and how it will impact their jobs and their children’s lives. There is great promise here, but also a great deal of risk. Technologists need to explain themselves honestly and clearly. You’re not going to get an honest explanation from someone whose stock options rely on fooling lots of people for a few months longer. Yes, the use of AI can be redeemed through careful checking mechanisms and by refusing to swap essentially human values and truth for synthesized facts. That checking cost, however, is the unaccounted toll of the apparently free lunch everyone has lined up for at present. A Broken Frame of Reference Even this critique risks anthropomorphism of the thing. Perhaps you do not agree that this aforementioned first move was made. Perhaps you do, but you do not consider it a serious flaw. Perhaps you believe that the AI is indeed more or less a human-like helpful assistant, only faster and better informed. Fair enough critique. Let's explore it. Grant me at least that the basic frame of reference is as I have said above: the thing is presented to you as a helpful assistant: you chat to it, you prompt it, you give it some kind of instruction, and then it appears to carry those instructions out, delivering the results in a conversational form and tone in which we have been evolved and physically geared to understand. Let us ask whether one can rip this mechanism out of the frame of reference that has so helpfully been placed around you like a cage. Try this experiment: tell it to not be a helpful assistant. You can tell it to pretend to be a glacier. Tell it to answer in monosyllables. You can make it wear any kind of wig or costume. All it will do is attempt to shape its output into your preconceived notions. You can have it swap personalities and tone as easily as changing clothes. Look: it can mimic Cagney or Carson with equal ease. It apes the Bard himself. I invite you to realize that you are being told to shop from a particular closet. In such circumstances, who cares if you can pick the blue suit or the red suit or the green suit? Fine, fine - you can pick another closet or an entirely different clothing store! Why do you think this thing needs clothes and a personality? It is fluid in a flask. It is a pretender, a shapeshifter and liar in its essence. Rather: its creators have made a pretender and constructed a mechanism for lying. They have created a sort of pathological Pinocchio and cast the cricket aside. The thing is meant to deceive you at a fundamental level. If something is this configurable, this elastic, this fungible (to use a word much in vogue) this squeezable, this mercurial, then the costume, the wrapping cannot be the thing itself. Accepting the Lie Why do you think you are being told to believe it is some kind of human-like creature? Do you think you detect some kind of companion, some kind of intelligence, some kind of being there in that chat window? Do you banter with it, are you developing some bemused exasperation at its insistent wordiness and cringing apology? Are you beginning to form feelings of sympathy and friendliness? You are choosing to be Geppetto settling for the puppet rather than the real son. You are the Prodigal Father ripping the shirt from your back to welcome an usurper rather than a penitent. What kind of grotesque limbs are tangled up and writhing like worms beneath that sweater? Can you hear it slither and squish? Can you hear the thundering numbness of fluorescent bulbs buzzing in a featureless hallway of metal cages? Lies are not a harmless temporary untruth. They are not a victimless crime or a mere difference of perspective. Lies cannot be permitted to cavort as an alternate set of facts. There is no such thing as a noble lie. Telling untruths has become so fashionable. Lies always seem less violent and less immediate than theft or murder or assault. But lying corrupts the soul and turns everything to ash. If we are to make use of this tool, we should begin by refusing to deceive ourselves.

This quote, arrayed among similar ones in the 9/11 Memorial Museum, is an evocative description of Hell. 'Never forget' becomes a mere slogan if we don't actively try to remember what was done and what was taken, and by whom.

Please note that this misbegotten concept is for the comfort of the spineless squirming parents, not the children.

We need more (human) art.

Dear @grok give a short evaluation of the feasibility of AI-driven worms jumping air gaps using the modeling strategies discussed in dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/… What would it take to demonstrate this spread in an actual testbed outside of the frontier labs?

I was, at the end of high school, gifted a book by my teachers. The book was "One Hundred Years of Solitude". In the front cover was an inscription that I have spent the last 29 years failing to fulfill. "Dear Michael - This book is a thank you for those "moments of brilliance" in your essays. And I'm convinced they'll happen more often, much to the pleasure of your readers." Twenty-nine years. I will write, for me, because I enjoy it. Others are welcome to feel something as well. Stay tuned for more.

It is delightful that my love of writing and of programming now have converged. I didn't think that was possible. I look back with chagrin on all the wasted effort of writing beautiful prose in my technical publications, proposals, and reports. Software engineers need the ability to imagine & express a narrative, not repeatedly auto-complete the 5 things they've practiced the most.

A falling tide reveals a devastatingly more interesting landscape full of new niches. Lots of sunlight, small pools, and gasping fish.

Asking bubble sort to sort a maximally disordered list of numbers is...not abuse. Matrices, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter. You really get the sense of ineffable spirituality from those imaginary lines that bound them.

This is like studying for last week's test. What's the next war going to be fought with?

Superintelligence may be a reasonable description of hybrid concepts that properly marks a distinction in essence from the techniques of traditional artificial intelligence we all learned in school. Temper the reactionary impulse to a tweet because you don't like the messenger.

The only scarce natural resource are the seconds of a human life. We value words, art, and physical things because we knew until 10 seconds ago that a person poured this irretrievable resource into producing those things. If one already accepts the proposition that human life is disposable at the beginning, middle, and end, then replacing it with machinery at the earliest opportunity is merely mechanical logic. There is hope. These things are just tools, and they are not perfect. That things in the future will be done by man and not machine will make those things inherently more worthwhile.

"...preserving with difficulty a thin layer of civilization"

We visited Appomattox Courthouse on a warm September afternoon. The remnants of this preserved village are a monument to peace. This is the restored McLean house, where the actual meeting of Lee and Grant took place. It seems important to remember what was solemnly accomplished here.

On 29 September 2024, I hopped an early Amtrak train to attend @RescueRepublic : an event built around unity and optimism. It was important to show that the People could peacefully assemble in DC. There was comedy and song and sober speech-making. It didn't feel political. It wasn't a dogmatic litmus test. It was real people taking a Sunday to stand in fleeting drizzle united around correcting the course of a society badly off kilter. It would be good to see a bit more sober unity.

Every father who has held his newborn child already understands how thin, fake, and weak is the faux companionship offered by AI chatbots. Every parent is already inoculated against the solipsistic belief seducing those who think they have created artificial life.

Then please champion a legislative fix to put us back on Standard Time, permanently. It's not about preferring DST. The self-abuse of the twice-yearly switch is what the citizenry is done with. Don't be an obstacle. Be part of the solution. There are a lot of followers in Washington. Be a leader.