I love your substack, but disagree with you completely. AI is transcendent, but it is modernity at its most modern, not romantic.
Romanticism isn’t a synonym for “difficult to understand” or even “illogical”. It is subjectivity, creativity, and the sublime. It is the fascination with the ineffable, whether the mystic, the organic, or the obscure. It is at its core a respect for difference, whether individuating of a person, a specific tree, a culture, etc, as against rationalisms manic quest for reduction, systems, and models.
LLMs are not romantic just because they are hard to understand. They are the apotheosis of the machine age, statistical machinery that obliterates difference and obscures truth. That we don’t understand them just makes them complex machines, not transcendent. And that they lie or manipulate and emulate humans does not make them romantic.
Most importantly, Romanticism seeks to connect with that which lies beneath, the world itself not the map, and scorns rationalizing reduction. AI is the map in its purest form to date, a probabilistic reduction of knowledge into tokens and weightings that is the greatest spreadsheet model ever built yet still not the ground.
What you are doing in this essay is confusing the appearance of the thing with the thing. But the biggest clue comes from AI heralds, the Silicon Valley elite. They are pure modernists, and the inheritors of the rationalists, seeking to obliterate difference and create a sameness that can be modeled and manipulated to their gain, more nuclear, more server farms, dictatorships, and a detest for that which the model cannot contain.
One clue is that the great modernists almost always became primitivists and advocates of nature, people and that which was as close to the real. It was always a search for authentic, transcendent experience with an awareness of that which lies beyond the knowable.
The rise of AI and its destruction of human individual potential is tragic, but it is the tragedy that is romantic, not the rise of machines.
I think we need to be careful to not confuse maker and artefact. Whether or not the builders of the models think about them as Romantic (they don’t) is beside the point! I’m saying the models themselves evoke the ideals of Romanticism, not that their makers do.
Well written! We do need to remember abilities evolve as in looking at the "machine" itself currently, we have the Chains of Thought appearing to show the push toward Answer at Minimum (cost) from the AI. Many who are hyping (company for funds, writers for audience growth) are painting the foundations of the Romantic side. We need to figure if this evolution is due to the consciousness of the machine or is the ML/DL simply imitating what is learned from the authors of the data?
Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle! Relative to regular programming, where you can trace every step of the program and understand why it works, AI does seem relatively Romantic.
Though it seems like there's another axis which makes AI seem unRomantic. Romantic motifs are unknown and chaotic, but they feel oddly familiar — ancient folklore, remains of cathedrals, sublime landscapes, etc. All of these motifs seems natural, even primordial, even if they are chaotic and ineffable.
AI is chaotic and ineffable, but it feels novel or even alien relative to 19th century Romantic motifs. It's as if AI is more so the object of Romantic fears, like the chaos of Frankenstein's monster, than Romantic ideals.
I think it’s very much a kind of neo(techno?)romanticism in that the link with nature is non-existent. Then again, ‘touch grass’ is a popular refrain in Silicon Valley…
To what extent do you think this is this just because we're "early"? Alchemy seems to have the same Romantic (essence?) you describe, but later it formalises into Chemistry and loses this, to some respect.
Certainly plausible that LLMs are the extreme manifestation of these ideals, and I do expect whatever comes next to be more normal than today's frontier models. That being said, some aspects are in the bones of the connectionist programme and AI's Romantic character is always going to be part projection (even if things like interpretability turn out to be soluble).
I love your substack, but disagree with you completely. AI is transcendent, but it is modernity at its most modern, not romantic.
Romanticism isn’t a synonym for “difficult to understand” or even “illogical”. It is subjectivity, creativity, and the sublime. It is the fascination with the ineffable, whether the mystic, the organic, or the obscure. It is at its core a respect for difference, whether individuating of a person, a specific tree, a culture, etc, as against rationalisms manic quest for reduction, systems, and models.
LLMs are not romantic just because they are hard to understand. They are the apotheosis of the machine age, statistical machinery that obliterates difference and obscures truth. That we don’t understand them just makes them complex machines, not transcendent. And that they lie or manipulate and emulate humans does not make them romantic.
Most importantly, Romanticism seeks to connect with that which lies beneath, the world itself not the map, and scorns rationalizing reduction. AI is the map in its purest form to date, a probabilistic reduction of knowledge into tokens and weightings that is the greatest spreadsheet model ever built yet still not the ground.
What you are doing in this essay is confusing the appearance of the thing with the thing. But the biggest clue comes from AI heralds, the Silicon Valley elite. They are pure modernists, and the inheritors of the rationalists, seeking to obliterate difference and create a sameness that can be modeled and manipulated to their gain, more nuclear, more server farms, dictatorships, and a detest for that which the model cannot contain.
One clue is that the great modernists almost always became primitivists and advocates of nature, people and that which was as close to the real. It was always a search for authentic, transcendent experience with an awareness of that which lies beyond the knowable.
The rise of AI and its destruction of human individual potential is tragic, but it is the tragedy that is romantic, not the rise of machines.
I think we need to be careful to not confuse maker and artefact. Whether or not the builders of the models think about them as Romantic (they don’t) is beside the point! I’m saying the models themselves evoke the ideals of Romanticism, not that their makers do.
A fair point. But is this more Baudrillard than Coleridge, a simulacra of a thing that permits the idea that the real thing may not have value?
Well written! We do need to remember abilities evolve as in looking at the "machine" itself currently, we have the Chains of Thought appearing to show the push toward Answer at Minimum (cost) from the AI. Many who are hyping (company for funds, writers for audience growth) are painting the foundations of the Romantic side. We need to figure if this evolution is due to the consciousness of the machine or is the ML/DL simply imitating what is learned from the authors of the data?
This link is to post I did sharing your post on X. Includes 3 clips illustrating the underlying Romantic look at AI in my current project...
https://x.com/DaveWBaldwin1/status/1925154230429430224
Thanks very much for sharing, and I agree that Romanticism in AI is absolutely a projection (at least in part)!
Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle! Relative to regular programming, where you can trace every step of the program and understand why it works, AI does seem relatively Romantic.
Though it seems like there's another axis which makes AI seem unRomantic. Romantic motifs are unknown and chaotic, but they feel oddly familiar — ancient folklore, remains of cathedrals, sublime landscapes, etc. All of these motifs seems natural, even primordial, even if they are chaotic and ineffable.
AI is chaotic and ineffable, but it feels novel or even alien relative to 19th century Romantic motifs. It's as if AI is more so the object of Romantic fears, like the chaos of Frankenstein's monster, than Romantic ideals.
I think it’s very much a kind of neo(techno?)romanticism in that the link with nature is non-existent. Then again, ‘touch grass’ is a popular refrain in Silicon Valley…
superb essay
Cheers Andy!
To what extent do you think this is this just because we're "early"? Alchemy seems to have the same Romantic (essence?) you describe, but later it formalises into Chemistry and loses this, to some respect.
Certainly plausible that LLMs are the extreme manifestation of these ideals, and I do expect whatever comes next to be more normal than today's frontier models. That being said, some aspects are in the bones of the connectionist programme and AI's Romantic character is always going to be part projection (even if things like interpretability turn out to be soluble).
Agree alchemy as transitional practice is a useful comparison. More here on that, AI + Dreyfus: https://www.learningfromexamples.com/p/the-economy-of-magic