Today a thought occurred to me. What have queer theorists written about Alan Turing? A germinal figure in the history of computing and artificial intelligence, Turing was chemically castrated as punishment for “gross indecency” with another man. This barbaric treatment, which may have led to his suicide (disputed), occurred in Great Britain, a nation Turing helped save during WWII through his codebreaking of enemy intelligence. He invented the Turing test for AI.
When I asked ChatGPT about this, the app told me about the work Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, and Paul Preciado had done on Turing. But it also told me about an essay by Christopher Nealon, entitled “Turing’s Manhood,” that was published in a volume co-edited by me.
Neither the essay nor that volume exist.
I consulted Nealon’s profile at Johns Hopkins, and could not find this essay on his CV. But it does sound like the kind of essay he could have written. So I told ChatGPT it was mistaken, which it freely confessed to and apologized.
I then asked it to speculate on what Nealon would write in an essay entitled “Turing’s Manhood,” if he were to write one. It obliged, and the results were right there in the uncanny valley: not Nealon, but close enough to Nealon (or a generic queer theorist) that it was disturbing to read.
The actual Nealon is writing about infinity and how the fascination that many theorists (myself included I guess) seem to have with phenomena of large scale (such as LLMs) is symptomatic of a) a retreat from close reading and b) a retreat from the critique of capitalism.
I imagine the actual Nealon would not approve of the essay a LLM wrote in his name. The term of art I believe is “hallucination”: ChatGPT “hallucinated” “Turing’s manhood.” But that term of art is misleading for two reasons: an AI cannot hallucinate, and even if it could, it’s unlikely it would immediately back down when corrected.
Once again, I ran this essay (which I wrote by scratch) through ChatGPT for comment. It understood the essay (or offered a persuasive simulacra of understanding in the form of summary) and admonished me not to rely on the information provided by an AI.
I’m suddenly concerned about filling this SubStack with junk. The principle immediate threat I can see with ChatGPT is that people will use it to fill the internet with even more junk. Or, more likely, they will use AI that are less “woke” or positively “anti-woke” (ChatGPT has pretty effective guardrails against generating anti-social content, as my boyfriend discovered when he asked it to help him conjure the devil).
An essay entitled “Turing’s Manhood” could and probably should be written. It might deal with homophobia, hormone therapy, toxic masculinity, and the queerness of computation. It might also try to make sense of our current conjuncture: one in which the technologists developing AI are also calling it an existential threat to humanity, while the fascists rallying against “gender ideology” falsely consider transgender and queer folk to be a threat to their children. Maybe I should try to write it?
Notes:
https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/infinity-for-marxists
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