George Carlin, AI outrage, and the purity test

A thought about AI outrage, and about the increasingly dogmatic tendency to turn generative AI into a test of moral purity among writers. This is a live issue among many of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues.

Back in 1994 and 1995, George Carlin had a short-lived sitcom on the Fox network titled The George Carlin Show. I remember it as enjoyable, though ratings were low, and it was canceled after two seasons. I also distinctly remember reading an interview with Carlin that he gave when the show debuted. At one point, the interviewer asked him what he would say to readers who might wonder how Carlin, given his well-established career and reputation as an anti-establishment voice who criticized things like consumerism and mass-media idiocy, could justify becoming involved with a network television show. Wasn’t he just selling out? Carlin replied by proposing an analogy with the use of a common technology that was prevalent throughout society both then and today. Here’s the relevant passage:

Speaking of those turbulent ’60s, isn’t there something a bit askew about a dissident voice like Carlin’s joining the often-bland sitcom chorus? No, he says, glad to have the chance to tackle the question.

He recalls being accused by a friend back then of “selling out” for associating with some long-forgotten group.

“I was in his house and I said, `Is that your telephone?’ and he said `Yeah.’ I said, `Well, you’ve sold out. You have made an accommodation to the system. You’re doing business with the biggest monopoly in the country, AT&T.’ “

Life, Carlin continues, is not an either-or situation.

“That’s not the way life is. Somewhere in between you make accommodations that you are able to deal with. I need to do this now. I need to show I can act. I need to do something that is intelligent and funny.”

(From “Carlin Does Prime Time,” The Roanoke Times, January 15, 1994)

(Side note: Years later, in a 2007 interview for the Archive of American Television, Carlin said that when Fox first contacted him to discuss possibilities for a show, he thought, “You know, I’m 55, and maybe, before I completely put that shit in the toilet, that acting shit, maybe I should see if there’s a chance here for me to have a sitcom and to pay the mortgage off on this house and set myself up a little.” If you want to hear it for yourself, see the 30-second mark in this clip from the interview.)

If I may be permitted to unpack a bit more deeply what I think is Carlin’s deeper philosophical meaning: He was saying the point isn’t to try to achieve total innocence or purity by refusing to support “the system” or whatever with one’s actions, because that’s impossible. The system is all-encompassing. You can’t opt out of it without opting out of any societal presence or contact at all. So the point, instead, is to try to do something worthwhile within the system, making the most intelligent, wise, reasonable, moral, and helpful use of its tools as you can. I realize I’m extending Carlin’s point somewhat. Or maybe not. If so, I do think it’s a valid extension, one in line with his expressed attitude.

Back to AI, and applying all of the above to it: We gain little by adopting the logic of fundamentalism and taking an absolute, uncompromising, intransigent, one-sided, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil stand of rejection toward this technology. Nor is anything gained by declaring that any writer—or any person—who experiments with AI automatically counts as a sellout, a collaborator with evil, or a traitor to writers, artists, and creative work. That’s the mirror-image absurdity of heedlessly rushing to embrace AI and becoming an ardent and unthinking proselytizer for it.

On the matter of copyright outrage, which is so prominent in many writer’s judgments of the situation: My own books appear on published lists of works that have been used to train the big AI models. So I have skin in the game. That fact doesn’t settle the copyright question, of course, but it does mean I’m not speaking about it from some safe position outside the controversy.

On the matter of all the ecological concerns surrounding AI, the titanic water and energy inputs that attend it, and all that: Those concerns are real and deserve serious attention. But if you’re so up in arms about AI that you’re prepared to condemn anyone who uses it, then it’s fair to ask why you’re drawing the moral boundary precisely there. You’re reading these words on this platform, via the internet, using the device your fingers are touching right now, supported by the electricity and manufacturing infrastructures that consumed raw resources and fossil fuels to manufacture that device and then ship it to you. None of this absolves AI of whatever harms it may cause. But it does show that none of us occupies a position of technological, economic, or ecological purity.

There’s also the fact that this phase of consumer generative AI is such a recent development that we really don’t know yet how these concerns—ecological, economic, creative, psychological, or otherwise—are going to play out in the long term. We’re not even four years into the public ChatGPT era. We’ve seen journalism and academic work published from widely varying perspectives, but the overall picture remains cloudy. And yet some of us are already prepared to make absolute moral judgments about both the technology and our fellow human beings.

If I had to boil down my current response to all this to a single pithy expression, it would be: Just hold on. The dogmatists on both sides are speaking prematurely. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with yet, let alone what this technology will become—or what it will make of us, our work, and the world. Prudence begins by recognizing that we’re still in the earliest stages of understanding what generative artificial intelligence actually is. This means, among other things, that the question of whether writers can use it without losing their soul is still an open one.

Writing was already a technology before AI

Artificial intelligence may be the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself—which, as we do well to remember, was called into question by Plato in the Phaedrus through his myth of Thamus, the king who rejected writing when the god Theuth brought it as a gift to humankind. Thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised, but a bane, because it would allow people to offload their rightful task of thinking, knowing, and remembering onto an external crutch, thereby encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom.

As Neil Postman pointed out when discussing this myth, while it’s true that every technology involves some kind of trade-off, most of us would probably disagree with Thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a profound net benefit for the human race.

Today, with the advent of large language models, we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our interactions with communications technologies, and we are once again called upon to make a judgment with serious consequences.

Writing is already a technology. The real question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing makes possible.

A portable inner monastery of the muse

Twenty-two years ago I read Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture and encountered one of the most personally resonant ideas that I’ve ever found in a work of cultural criticism: the “monastic option” and the “new monastic individual.” The idea was that we can each become a monk, cultivating a kind of portable inner monastery.

Berman argued that in a time of cultural decline, the most meaningful forms of resistance and preservation may need to remain private, small-scale, and largely outside the attention economy (though he didn’t actually use the latter term). “The more individual the activity is, and the more out of the public eye,” he wrote, “the more effective it is likely to be.” That struck me deeply when I first read it in 2004, and it has only grown more meaningful over time.

Some people are natural joiners and institution-builders. Others aren’t. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the image of the solitary monk, someone who pursues a deeply and personally meaningful path of preservation and transmission, and who relates to others through affinity based on this inner orientation, instead of through external organizational structures. Organizations carry a built-in tendency to become inward-turned in their own way over time. They eventually and inevitably betray their founding principles by focusing on sheer self-perpetuation. Maybe it’s prudent to keep an ironic awareness of this fact, and to invest in our real ideals at the individual level, in the sanctity of our selves.

Berman wrote that we can each choose “a way of life that becomes its own ‘monastery.’” That phrase has stayed with me for years. It eventually became one of the guiding ideas in Writing at the Wellspring, where I describe the possibility of carrying “a portable inner monastery of the muse.”

I’ve published a new Living Dark post that reflects on all of this: Berman, the solitary monastic ideal, institutions and inward life, and the idea of preserving a living connection with reality during an age of noise and collapse. It’s titled “The Monastery of Your Life.”

The dream of the outside world

Without mincing words: The dominant consensus reality is a hallucination. It’s a mirage, and also a trance. A dream of the outside world.

Anything that resembles a reality or a view of reality imposed from without, from outside of you, any explanation or model of things that tries to tell you what’s ultimately real from the vantage point of an objective, external world that you, as a separate individual, inhabit—in other words, the dominant consensus reality—is a sucker punch. It’s a trick.

The “outside world” isn’t outside at all. It exists inside you as pure consciousness. So does the “you,” the notionally independent self that seems to be located in and confronted by such a world.

The objective perspective, then, is an inverted view of things that’s constantly attempting to undermine the reality of your actual situation. You’re not a separate individual inhabiting a world. Instead, you’re absolute, pure awareness, and the world is a kind of virtual experience arising within you—including your experience or perception of being an individual unit, a separate being within it.

Holding to this understanding in a culture whose consensus view maintains the opposite will make you seem like an outlier to most people. The social consequences may be severe. But then, this perceived social reality, along with the perceived consequences of rejecting it, is likewise unfolding within the field of your own being. It’s you being reflected back to yourself.

Learning to navigate this reflection or projection is like learning to navigate your nocturnal dreams. You only ever encounter your own self, divided into the seemingly separate centers of subjective perceiver and objective perceived.

If you cultivate the habit of recognizing and greeting everything that arises, including your own subjective weather, as a complementary and ultimately harmonious dance of Yourself with Yourself (including when the feeling of it isn’t harmonious at all), everything takes on a rather wondrous aspect. Sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes mysteriously so, and sometimes darkly so.

This is just the way of dreams.

The mystery of the self and the dream of reality

We commonly overlook the fact that the ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery—the mystery of the self. We ourselves are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very own Identity: the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability.

“The world is nothing but the picture of your own ‘I’ consciousness,” Nisargadatta Maharaj once said (as recorded in Prior to Consciousness). “Do not worry about the world. First start from here: the ‘I Am,’ and then find out what is the world. Find out the nature of this ‘I.’” And also, as recorded in Consciousness and the Absolute (the final book of his transcribed and edited talks to be published before his death in 1981, “Not only is the body-mind unreal, but this manifest consciousness, this universe, is also unreal. The ‘I Amness’ is dream-like, ephemeral.” And thus: “Find out what you are and you will get all the answers.”

Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective, which inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos, is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.