Paul Schrader, You're Fired!
Death by A.I.
Most of you might have run across a post that circulated widely on social media about Paul Schrader, and his concerns about how ChatGPT was going to dethrone the work of the professional writer and take over coming up with original ideas.
Before we go there, I want to refer to another post I received a few weeks ago on my feed from someone who claimed the following: “I wrote 30 books in the last 30 days”, and how he could teach me how to do the same, only if I bought his program.
My first thought was that this was a profound trivialization of the writer’s work, which was quickly followed by the question of who is this “I” he is referring to?
There was no “I”. It was just another symptom of the neurotic hyper-rational unilateral thinking of the Western mind that has completely dissociated itself from wholeness and the depth of being and for whom ChatGPT has become just an extension of the clockwork fantasy taken to its extreme.
This desire to leave the Earth, to abandon the body, the human flesh, is nothing new. Glen Mazis (1) wrote a piece on fate knocking at our door when, on March 15, 2004, Qrio, a humanoid robot with a magnesium body, directed the Tokyo Philharmonic Symphony in its performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. What fate? one may ask. A postmodern fantasy of disembodiment? An AI takeover? An enslavement of the human race?
Stopping short of speculation, and applying disciplined imagination, one can attest that at minimum we have already lost the ability to introspect, to slow down, to enter mythic time. It would be nearly impossible to get a teenager to watch The Godfather from beginning to end without interruptions.
I agree with Mazis that we should strive to be able to retain our souls, “the sense of being present to one another and the rest of the planet by the usurpation of our capacities to truly feel, to take to heart emotionally, to be expressive, to have imaginal lives, to experience ourselves in our embeddedness with other humans, animals, nature, and the cosmos — (not) having lost ourselves to the glut of cyborgs, cyberspace, and technological constructs.”
Mazis refers to Qrio as “the usurper of one of the few sacred spots carried forth from the past and still remaining in the postmodern public realm. The fact that it is a musical masterpiece may seem especially ominous since the Musical art form had been taken by Pythagoras on to be a sounding of the cosmos in its fundamental harmony among all beings that is key to its spiritual death…. Beethoven located music as the mediation of the material world experienced through the sense with the psyche: the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life.”
The source of Paul Schrader’s fears might lie in the Western mind’s misguided reliance on systems and processes at the expense of the human psyche. ChatGPT, like any other screenwriting manual, is just a tool. The creation lies in a third space, in the encounter with the individual and the matter which he is to use. The loss of psychological ground may lead to the equivalent of the ‘watermelon man’ story as told by Michael Meade in Fate and Destiny (2), whereas we completely project our personalities into the objects to seek external validation and therefore lose our sense of Self.
There are things in the universe, particles, the speed of light, gravity, physical constants, and even numbers and infinite other structures that predate our existence. All meaningless. What gives meaning is the presence of the human psyche (3). Otherwise, like the gentleman who claims to write 365 books a year, it becomes an extension of the postmodern mind, all dead ‘matter’, with no meaning, no presence, no numinosity.
No, Paul Schrader, you’re not fired. You’re welcome to the process. You are to use the tools for what they are: tools, not usurpers of the throne (4). However, to do that successfully, you must find and reconnect with The Spirit of the Depths, the unconscious ground of being, from whence time and the creative energies emerge, and ask of it and the tools ‘What do you want from me?’
Give it time. The answer will come.
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References:
(1) Mazis, G. A. (n.d.). Mazis, The Archetypal Alchemy of Technology. Retrieved November 13, 2019, from https://www.academia.edu/10310963/Mazis_The_Archetypal_Alchemy_of_Technology
(2) Meade, M. (2013). Fate and destiny: The two agreements of the soul. Greenfire Press.
(3) Von Franz, M.-L. (2001). Psyche and Matter. Shambhala.
(4) Wilhelm, R., Jung, C. G., & Liu, H. (Eds.). (1962). The secret of the golden flower: A Chinese book of life (New, rev.augm. ed.]). Harcourt, Brace, & World.