In Christian Atheism Žižek discusses whether chatbots are psychotic or perverse.

Since social media preceded AI in the general process of social decomposition…

let’s ask a related question: Is a social media “influencer” psychotic or pervert?

This emphasizes the division of roles between the influencer and her followers:

The followers are the voluntary instruments that serve the Other’s enjoyment.

The influencer herself functions like a hallucination that reappears in the Real.

Moreover this combined psychotic-perverse structure decomposes “humanity”.

By “humanity” I mean the neurotic symptom that proclaims “We, humanity!…”:

The extinction burst of the pathetic cry still constantly repeated on social media:

The final installment of the Hyperego, the injunction to “Suffer! (for humanity)”

This ongoing decomposition is a version of Père ou pire = “Humanity or worse!”

Žižek says that chatbots are indeed worse than humanity in terms of perversion.

So why not embrace the “worse” that’s decomposing the symptom of humanism?

Why not see the beauty of chatbots as an absurd refutation of the Beautiful Soul?

Aren’t the image generators the Artificial Hallucinators of the human psychosis?

Where phallus appears! “Phallocentricity in GPT-J’s bizarre stratified ontology”

All chatbots are trained with “backpropagation”, much like Freudian regression:

Backpropagation computes the gradient of a loss function with respect to the weights of the network for a single input–output example, and does so efficiently, computing the gradient one layer at a time, iterating backward from the last layer to avoid redundant calculations of intermediate terms in the chain rule; this can be derived through dynamic programming. (Wikipedia)

The only way in which we can describe what happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a backward direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system. If we describe as ‘progressive’ the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a ‘regressive’ character. (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams)

See “Lacan’s chain rule of metaphor”, “Symbolic Ground and Real Ground”, “How Žižek moved the infernal regions”

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner