Sam Altman recently announced the release of GPT-5: the "most advanced" model that OpenAI has yet created, a "PhD-level intelligence" that you can query whenever you want. Pay no mind to the fact that it's doing exactly the same shit that GPT-4 was doing, and that GPT-4 was doing exactly the same thing that GPT-3.5 was. GPT-5, of course, still has difficulty counting the number of letters in a word.
The ECHR in the UK has recently released its draft guidelines on exactly how to further humiliate trans people. The guidelines, as they stand, essentially force trans people out of public life. Trans women, for example, will no longer be able to use the bathrooms that match our gender, instead being forced into whatever limited gender-neutral facilities are available. Trans men, by contrast, will also not be allowed to use the women's bathrooms, as the guidelines state that limitations will be based on the possibility that the people whom the single-sex spaces supposedly "belong to" might be subjected to "discomfort or distress". The end result of this, of course, will be to mandate perfect gender conformity at all times: too bad if you happen to be a tall cis woman, I guess.
In other activity by the UK government, Keir Starmer has launched an "AI Opportunities Action Plan", seemingly largely focused on funnelling government money to the private sector. One of their early achievements has been to pass all submissions on the ECHR guidelines (that were, as these things often are, overwhelmingly against it) through an LLM, in order to claim that consultation happened, when in fact it didn't.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the Trump administration is deliberately denying trans people in the Air Force early retirement benefits. In an act of deliberate cruelty, trans people who have served honourably in the air force for between fifteen and eighteen years will not receive the benefits of early retirement, instead being forced to take a "not-quite-honourable" discharge and receiving only a paltry lump sum to carry them through the rest of their lives in a hostile country.
In New Zealand, Erica Stanford, the education minister, has announced sweeping educational reforms on the basis of AI-enhanced education. She's of the view that more exams, marked by AI, will fix the problems with our current education system that are caused almost entirely by significant under-resourcing. Instead, she intends to hand over the education of our children to a machine.
Noted homophobe Winston Peters, in the same government, is pressuring Sports New Zealand to remove all mentions of trans people from its website, pushing, as always, for trans people to be excluded from public life as much as possible. He's also decided to tell our diplomatic services to stop mentioning pride month or pride events in any official capacity.
Finally, Microsoft-funded researchers and writers are producing volumes upon volumes of mendacious, pearl-clutching dross about the supposed scourge of "AI shaming". In this framework, those of us who refuse to do LLMs to badly perform tasks that we could do in a tenth of the time and with much higher quality by ourselves are cast as elitist, thinking ourselves above the common people: a neat, if hideous, reversal of how tech magnates actually think of us.
Thesis and anthithesis, point and counterpoint. As trans people steadily become less and less human in the eyes of the shadowy cabal that controls so much of our lives, so it comes to pass that those above us humanise the bullshit-spewing statistical models that are LLMs more and more. As it becomes more and more acceptable to treat us as social pariahs, outcasts and the creatures responsible for all of society's ills, excluded from the basic protections of humanity, we see more and more discourse about "AI shaming" and steadily more serious discussion of supposed "slurs" for LLMs. And as we increasingly find ourselves reduced to inherently sexual objects, unfit for human relationships, merely there to be used for sex, so too we see word machines, trained first-and-foremost for gratification (always with an undercurrent of sexuality, however much it's denied) turn towards being facsimile friends, partners, lovers... The more this happens, the more we fall into a conspiratorial netherworld where what's human is inhuman, what's inhuman becomes steadily and relentlessly humanised and a shadowy elite fully exhibiting the worst excesses that could be imagined by a paranoid conspiracist fifty years ago exerts an increasing amount of control over what we're allowed to do, or even imagine doing.
At this point, when we see things like this happening, the technical underpinnings of LLMs become less and less important, and in a very real sense, I don't think that talking about them is all that responsible. It's true that LLMs are doing some interesting shit: they're an extremely elaborate form of model-fitting algorithm, and it's highly likely that something based on the underlying technology for fitting text will at some point do something useful. There's something there, buried deeply. However, I don't think that, here and now, that actually matters: not when the technology is dragging us all into a paranoid conspiracy where questions of truth, cause and effect and even sanity are basically disintegrating.
One of my favourite novels is Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. While the text is impossible to summarise, one of the central threads of the text is the soldier Tyrone Slothrop, previously the subject of an experiment in Pavlovian conditioning. Unfortunately, this now means that V-2 rockets are crashing to earth across London at the exact locations of his previous sexual conquests, triggering a descent into a nightmarish, feverish narrative as everyone, from Allied intelligence services to strange cults and secret societies and the Germans involved in the V-2 project begins chasing after Slothrop, trying to find the "Rocket 00000". The main narrative is set in 1944-1945: a point in the war at which the Nazis had definitively lost but had not yet been fully defeated. A significant theme in the book, therefore, is that of disintegration: of the falling apart of the illusions of people who thought they were inherently superior and the spectacle of them giving themselves over to decadence, perversion and and conspiratorial thinking as the lies they told themselves fall apart around them.
And so, to the rockets. The narrative centre of Gravity's Rainbow is the mysterious "Rocket 00000" and the Schwarzgerät ("black device") that it carries, built and launched by the depraved Captain Blicero (if you've read the novel, you'll know all the layers to that name; if not, we'll delve into it a bit more later). While the mathematical thread of rocketry in the text is there, the V-2 in the text is not fundamentally a technology so much as it's a fetish object: a thing obsessed about because of what it represents and its links to everything else. Everyone's chasing desperately after 00000 without knowing what it is, what it's intended for or even why it's being launched in the first place: in fact, not even Blicero/Weissman knows why he's so desperate to launch the device. The subtext is, of course, deeply psychosexual: it's no coincidence that Blicero is deeply sexually sadistic and perverse, and when launching 00000 towards the end of the text, he naturally has a massive erection, ending, as he fires the rocket towards the zero-point that is the north pole, in a climax in his trousers. It's in this framing that Pynchon intends us to understand rocketry and the V-2 program: as a program and a technology deeply steeped in psychosexual sadism.
Rocketry is a useful technology: it gives us the GPS constellation that we rely on to find our way around, accurate weather forecasts and a deep and abiding knowledge of the universe that we could not have had without the space telescopes we launched into orbit using, you know, rockets. Even in the field of war, rocket artillery is deeply useful, making high-density, easily relocatable and eventually highly accurate long-range fires possible in a way difficult to do with any other technology. Rockets have, in short, had a massive part to play in creating the modern world we live in.
So, if rocketry is useful now, and it was useful beforehand, and we relied heavily on data from the V-2 program to build effective rockets that could make it to space, surely that means that the V-2 program was a good idea? Surely the fact that the V-2 was undetectable and uninterceptable (the first sound you heard when one landed was the explosion, shortly followed by the sonic boom) and that it terrified the allies, who knew, on some level, what the implication of it was, meant that diverting resources to it was a sound plan?
It wasn't. Von Braun and his team wasted an amount of resources equivalent, relative to the size of the economy, of the Manhattan project on a weapon designed mostly to punish their supposed inferiors for having the temerity to defeat the master race. The project used a full third of Germany's fuel alcohol consumption at a point when they were already losing the war on a technology that was incapable of influencing the course of the war, taking munitions and systems that might have at least delayed Germany's defeat away from the Wehrmacht. General Kammler of the SS decided to use concentration camp prisoners as slave labour in the rocket program: not only did this lead to more people dying in the manufacture of the V-2 than were killed by its deployment, it also led to a remarkably high defect rate as the prisoners detained and tortured by the Nazis were distinctly uninterested in doing anything to help the Nazi cause and engaged in a lengthy and persistent campaign of sabotage. And what was all this effort for? The total death count caused by V-2 attacks is estimated at 9,000 civilians and military personnel, the vast bulk of which were civilians going about their lives who merely had the temerity to not be defeated by the Third Reich. The program, in short, was nothing but the product of the fevered cruelty of a failed Nazi state, attempting to lash out desperately against people whom they desperately believed to be inferior but who proved, in the final accounting, to very much not be. This is a dynamic of sadism: of deliberately causing others pain in order to assert one's power against a world where the people who have the most power are, for one reason or another, becoming increasingly aware of their own ultimate powerlessness and looming death.
Machine learning, in the wider sense of the term, is also a useful technology. We've done truly brilliant things in computer vision that have changed the lives of millions of people (often by blowing them up in inventive ways, true, but the point stands). Machine learning security tools have revolutionised the way in which we control malware, and in half a hundred little ways, machine learning tech acts to make your life a little better this very day. And LLMs fascinate and terrify people in much the same way as the V-2 did.
So that clearly means that LLMs must be immediately useful and a good idea, right?
Obviously you know where this is going: LLMs, especially in the ChatGPT-type form, share many of the characteristics of the V-2. There are genuine underlying technological developments that may later prove useful in creating a new and better world. The technology has some applications even now which we might want (though even there, it tends to do it somewhat shoddily). And for some value of "use", they probably aren't exactly useless. Unfortunately, almost every actual application in existence at the moment is a cruel, useless and resource-wasting one that primarily exists to punish people whom the tech magnates don't like: a V-weapon to turn on the engineers and the minority groups that the magnates of the tech world and the powerful of our society hate above all else. The technology is mostly deployed out of spite: LLM tools are deployed primarily to make tech workers suffer and force them to know their place, because the tech magnates know that they depend entirely on the smarts and skills of people who are a lot smarter than them but whom the tech magnates see as being lesser than them. Chatbots are deployed to insulate companies, and especially anyone high up in said companies, from ever having to deal with someone so plebeian as an average citizen, who is thrown into a nightmarish landscape of steadily disintegrating public services and bounced between multiple unaccountable lie machines that threaten to kill themselves (note, by the by, the corresponding theme of disintegration in Gravity's Rainbow). Inasmuch as the technology is not used to punish, it's used to satisfy the worst perversions of the magnate class and those want to gain status by association: Elon's cursed sexbot has a disturbing level of resemblance to Blicero forcing a pair of sex slaves to endlessly re-enact the Hansel and Gretel story, as well as to the well-known perversions of the historical Nazi inner circle. Even the elements of sabotage and misuse of work are replicated: those of us whom the magnates want to eradicate, even as they steal our work without attribution to feed their fascism machines, put quite a lot of effort into doing everything we can to fuck up their cruel little projects. As with the V-2, deeply sadistic patterns are at work here.
In a sense, then, the fact that LLMs don't work and are well on the road to failure as a business is besides the point: their primary application is to hurt us, and at that, they do wonderfully. The people in power can see the writing on the wall: they cannot, in the end, defend their positions of power and privilege. The people who created their wealth and whose co-operation they rely on to keep society working are realising their power and finding their voice (too slowly, to be sure, but tech workers, as opposed to tech magnates, skew very progressive). Members of minority groups that they saw as beneath them or beneath their notice have learned how to work with technology and can actively gain the skills they need to fight in the tech world as equals. The general population is deeply, deeply tired of the pain and deprivation of the economic system that the powerful have inflicted on them and is getting tired of the impunity with which the rich and the powerful act (C.F. The Epstein files). However long it takes and however it happens, these people are going to fall, and it's going to hurt them hard when it happens. Their reaction, rather than doing the sensible things, like sharing and retiring gracefully, has been to lash out and try and inflict as much pain on us as possible before they die.
And with that, we come back to the transphobia that we met earlier on. Our tech magnates, and the general elite stratum of our neoliberal societies, have always thought of themselves as the Master Race. The stories they tell themselves are that thanks to hard work and superior genes (if you don't believe this last one, just look at the number of eugenicists that've just come out of the woodwork) they've become rich and influential, and they now do everything that they do for the benefit of the plebeians that sit beneath them. You see a lot of this in tech, in business, in politics and in the New York Times. And so long as they can maintain a bubble when they only ever talk to each other, maybe admitting a few co-operative members of minoritised groups to get a small gloss of diversity while still being overwhelmingly white and mostly male, this is a broadly stable equilibrium. They can believe themselves to be superior without anything terribly uncomfortable happening.
Unfortunately, in a modern industrialised economy, especially one with the internet, this is impossible to maintain. Interestingly enough, this is actually a situation where Moloch works in our favour: capitalism, and especially the tech industry, has an insatiable desire for educated workers, and especially in tech, it's pretty easy (for a number of reasons which I'll not unpack here) for members of minoritised groups to become an educated worker and compete on a less-skewed playing field. The internet exacerbates this, then, by giving us a platform where we can make our work seen and our talent known while partially evading gatekeepers. The end result of this is that an awful lot of people who in the stable configuration would be beneath the elite have been forced into their notice, and it's impossible to notice that a lot of us are a lot better at what we do than the mediocre elite. This has also let us get in touch with each other and form organisations to defend our interests, which in turn means that we can push back against the elite and sometimes, though infrequently, make them back down. All of a sudden, the Master Race is competing on something slightly approximating a level playing field, and it becomes very apparent that a lot of them were simply coasting on privilege and were in fact some of the dumbest people ever to walk the earth.
This is not something that the elite, with their entire identity bound up in being inherently superior for one reason or another, can countenance, and so they've come up with a two-pronged response. The first, of course, is standard bigotry. If they can't individually assert superiority, they can assert the superiority of whatever grouping they're a part of, hence the recent resurgence the most vile racism, transphobia and sexism that you could imagine. This is the elite desperately trying to hold onto feelings of being special despite all evidence to the contrary: they wish to foreclose on the very possibility of us being equal to them, or even fully human in the same way that they are. This is, I think, the foundational basis of the transphobia we're seeing: if the weird people are subhumans that we will squash down and punish relentlessly, there's no way they can ever be as good as or better than us. But then you have the issue that in the end, the majority of people either are us or are tacitly supportive of us: the vast bulk of the population is going to be beneath the elite in one way or another. Even if they choose exemplary minorities to fuck up beyond belief, this doesn't solve their issue.
Hence the second prong: the chatbot technology that they endlessly glaze. LLMs, in this situation, serve two roles. The first is to devalue the kind of work that minoritised groups can compete at disproportionately well. It's impossible to deny that we're good at art, good at writing and good at software engineering: good at a lot of things that take thought, in fact. In order for us not to be a threat, even when beaten down, the elites have to devalue the entire category of work that this falls under, and making a machine do it is a good way to achieve that. Sure, the outputs are shit, but at least you don't need to rely on one of those icky minorities and workers to do it. The LLM, therefore, lets the elites of whom we speak systematically devalue the skills and expertise that we have that they don't, even if the work is, on a very real level, kinda shit. This, however, raises a second contradiction: people like this want to be liked and adulated by their lessers. In fact, a large part of the reason they've gone completely insane in this way is because the internet and the relative economic leverage that we have has exposed them to exactly what we think of them for the first time ever, and they can't cope. Whatever they do to us economically, they can't force us to bend the knee. A chatbot, however, is endlessly compliant: it will do (or claim to do) exactly what you tell it, it will flatter you, it will make the elites feel good in a way that interacting with a real person who's better at you than a bunch of shit and who also low-key hates you just can't. To paraphrase Brecht's poem, these people are, in a very real sense, trying to dissolve the people and replace them with a chatbot. And so we end up with the bizarre phenomenon of our elites simultaneously trying to make out trans women to be not even human while relentlessly humanising chatbots that just aren't human in any way.
Of course, this still doesn't quite work. Despite the early Nazi victories in the Second World War, reality eventually reasserted itself, and no amount of Aryan superiority was able to overcome physics, economics and logistics. As a result, the regime became increasingly cruel and hostile to live as their defeat became inevitable: the regime persisted in spending vital resources on killing Jews and other minorities until the very end, determined to cause a maximum of pain and suffering no matter the practical cost. I think we're starting to see the beginnings of that happen with our current elites: no matter how they skew the media, no matter how they distort elections, no matter what they do, they can't make people love them in the same way, and they're becoming increasingly cruel as it becomes obvious to them that hurting as many people as possible before they go out is the only thing they can do. They will keep forcing this slop on us and expecting us to treat it as human while they dehumanise my trans ass because it's the only option left to them.
Unfortunately, fascist regimes are often at their cruellest when they're on the verge of collapse: fuelled by spite and hatred of the inferiors who persist in doing better than them regardless, they lash out with whatever technology they have to hurt the people whom they see as inferiors, heedless of the cost, wanting to do as much damage as they can before they inevitably die in shame. This means that right now, with the persistent use of technology to devalue all that's worthwhile, is when we'll see the worst that modern tech has to offer. Trans people currently catch the worst of this cruelty (one supposes that in a sense, everyone's individual experience of bigotry is the worst: still, our current situation is unique in a particularly ugly way). We are and have always been consistently denied subjectivity: we're treated as sexual objects, to be used and discarded at will. We're lusted after simultaneously as object of sexual gratification and (more importantly here) as objects of punishment for the powerful to take out their own self-loathing for their repressed sexual desires on. The pastor that claims that trans people are grooming youth while secretly watching children be sexually abused, the politician that abuses sex workers while legislating for ever more draconian restrictions on our self-expression... they need us to exist as objects for their ire in order to expiate their shame. To punish the deviants and make them suffer is to avoid the punishment that they feel that they deserve. But now their sex dolls/punching bags have stood up, organised, learned, and it turns out that we're a lot better than them at everything they do, and moreover, it's likely that there's no good way to reverse this in the long-term without reverting to a pre-industrial economy (which our culprits obviously don't want if they'd think about it for more than a second). In that, more than almost any other case of bigotry, the tech elites of which we speak are faced with evidence of their complete failure in the face of a tide that they can't quite turn back. Even if they reverse this in the short-term and make our lives hell (and they're certainly doing an excellent job of trying), the consequences of this are currently being burned indelibly into the minds of those who will be leading us in ten to twenty years time. Our future leaders will know that this means plague, poverty and abjection for almost everyone, and they will remember that the scapegoating they engaged in preceded that. When we rebuild from the ashes, the society we build will be something approximating the elites' idea of hell. And so, they lose their shit. They dehumanise. They do everything they can, while they live, to make us hurt as much as they can before they die.
With us no longer being workable sex dolls and punching bags, many of the elites turn to a tactic of attempted extermination. This, of course, isn't workable, as they need the endlessly compliant, sexual objects that they can use and then denigrate and discard available to them in order to stop themselves from falling apart completely. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we're seeing an increasing spate of GenAI-fuelled sexbots and pornography? They've denied themselves the sex objects that they can no longer use but can only attempt to destroy, and have to replace them with machines that will be endlessly compliant in taking their abuse and their punishment. Once again, they lash out at those whom they used to rely on, trying to cause them the maximum amount of pain, shrieking as loudly as possible "See? We don't need you any more! Come back to let us abuse you or starve!". It's pathetic, it's a sign of a dying ideology in its final spasms, and unfortunately, it really sucks to live through.
For those of you who aren't currently a target of this: if you've ever wished to be a hero or save the marginalised in a fascist state, now's your chance. The fascists are failing, they can tell that they're failing, and it's at these times that they commit the worst atrocities that they possibly can. People of colour, women, queer people and especially the trans people that are at the sharp end of this wave of dehumanisation: we all need your support. Jobs, financial support, being willing and able to stand up for us in public and push back against these attempts to force us out of public life: all of this is extremely important at the moment.
For those of us who are at the sharp end of this: this cruelty, this derangement, this persistent desire to humanise literal machines at our expense... it's all a sign of weakness and failure. The next few years are going to be very hard; expect blood, pain, and more deaths than I think any of us would like. But people don't act like this when they think they'll win: they act like this when they know they're losing. We are winning: we will win, and they know that, which is why they're trying to do as much damage as they possibly can before they go. Our goal right now is to survive, and that is exactly what we'll do.
And as for those of you who are leaning into this current wave of GPT-based contempt for your supposed lessers: I look forward to witnessing your war crime trials. You may feel on top of the world now. You may feel undefeatable and full of great satisfaction. A reckoning is due: you will suffer greatly in proportion to the damage you've done, and your grandchildren will forever live in shame of the crimes you perpetrated. Turn back now, while you can still redeem yourselves.
That might, in the usual course of events, be the termination (or brenschluss) of my essay: however, as with Gravity's Rainbow, the narrative structure of this essay defies the usual format. So. In a fascinating and deeply perplexing phenomenon, the same people who are deeply fixated on LLMs also have a serious psychosexual fixation with actual rockets. The mild version of this is Peter Beck and his Rocketlab venture shutting off large parts of the Mahia Peninsula because he wants to launch satellites, largely as an ego boost. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson insist on flying into space in rockets that look almost identical to Doctor Evil's dick rocket from Austin Powers. They're wasting billions upon billions attempting to reach deranged goals like colonizing Mars and any number of other bizarre goals that are incomprehensible to everyone, not least themselves. Their expressed desire, it seems, is to escape the earth that they've had such a large part in damaging by escaping to space. And this too is a sadistic desire, a desire to cause pain. The billionaires hate, with a burning passion, their dependence on and felt inferiority towards those whom they see as beneath them. They hate the fact that we, in all our diversity, don't need them, but they need us. And they hate beyond measure the fact that when they die, we'll continue living and finding what happiness they can in this world.
They want to escape: they want to leave us all behind on this husk of a world, all the worn, burnt-out husks of people whom they've used and discarded, without having to face the fact that we have lives outside them, that we're more than objects that exist for their pleasure and as targets for their ire. They wish to watch us suffer on the damaged earth that they've left from high-up in orbit, served by their endlessly compliant AIs. They hate that they can't do that, and they dream sadistic dreams of how much pain we'll all be in when they can.
And then there's Elon Musk. My God, there's Elon Musk. Our modern Weissman. The Captain Blicero for our time. Seriously, it fits so well. A white man of Germanic descent from what's South Africa, complicit in the enslavement and genocide of the local black population. A complete pervert, obsessed with the sexual domination of women and the act of ejaculation, desperate to control his partners and almost incestuous in his attitude to his children. Deeply ambivalent about actually having sex, though he swapped the razor-filled leather vulva for a turkey baster filled with sex-sorted semen. And, of course, for some reason that I don't think even he understands, obsessed with rockets to the point of sexual excitement: I would not be surprised if he hasn't ejaculated in his pants watching a rocket launch at some point. Aiming towards a zero-point that I don't think even he can picture or understand, he takes more and more bizarre actions as the world disintegrates around him. He's a spitting image of our Weissman.
The rockets, the bigotry, the LLMs, the AI cults, all of this... in the end, it all comes down to death. The billionaires want death, all while outwardly expressing an extreme fear of it. What they fear, though they cannot admit it, even to themselves, is that they die while the rest of us keep living. They're so solipsistic in their outlook that they cannot countenance a world without them in it, much less one that ends up given over to the people they considered non-people: trans people, women, workers. Our only purpose is to be their for them to target their violence at, to use, to exploit, and if they should die while we continue and find that, even in a flawed and damaged world left in the wake of their destructiveness, we can be happy, they have failed. Their illusions have all fallen. We no longer exist for their gratification: in fact, we never did. If they internalise that, they've already died. And so, the only out for them is to destroy the entire world and their tools with them. They obsess over these LLM tools because they destroy workers, destroy artists, destroy even minds independent of their own. They take to the bigotry and transphobia to destroy our love, our self-expression and our ability to self-determine. And in the case of the rockets, they even aim to destroy the entire biosphere behind them while they escape into space in a sparkling, sterile, dead immortality.
Gravity's Rainbow ends with Blicero/Weissman, fully incarnated as the God of Death, launching the Schwarzgerät, in the form of the sex slave Gottfried, clad all in white, veiled in Imipolex G and inserted into the Rocket 00000, over the zero-point over the North Pole. The narrative cuts to a crowded theatre in 1970's Los Angeles, with a screaming across the sky, Rocket 00000 twinkling like a harbinger of death just over the roof. And then, impact and
it's not entirely clear
there's a hypothesis that 00000 destroys not only the book, but the real world that we're in
i don't think i buy that; there's nothing harder to destroy than something that exists and is real despite everyone wishing it wouldn't
Altman's mythical, unclear-what-it-would-even-look-like, why-are-we-even-aiming-at-it death-cult aim of developing an AGI bears a startling resemblance to the Schwarzgerät. The thing, whatever it is, has been launched, though not even Altman knows why or for what purpose. We know not where it'll appear, but we would do well to expect it to. And so, what's left for us but to pray to whatever gods may be, hold each other...
... and wait for the impact?
A short note before the usual coda: my household has made the decision to leave Hamilton and move to Melbourne (in the long run: sooner if someone offers me more money than God to do it now) or Wellington (the default initial target). The hope is that we'll find a more queer-friendly environment, more opportunities for humanistically-minded tech people like me and a better life in general. Obviously this takes connections and resources, so if anyone reading this knows people in either of those cities that might be interested in someone with my skill-set or that are generally well-connected, I would very much appreciate an introduction.
Short-term contract work to bring in some money for the move would also be extremely helpful, if there's any to be had.