The Ideas Letter

Dear Readers: We have a guest editor for Ideas Letter 66, my great colleague LuHan Gabel. LuHan has stewarded this very special issue on AI and technology from start to finish, and you shall see below the many fruits of her labor. – Leonard Benardo

As our culture pivots away from Enlightenment objectivity and rationality—think post-truth, the spread of conspiracy theories—and as the world becomes ever more chaotic, the thirst for sense-making is palpable. Our chatbots stand ready 24/7 to quench it. Flowing through these individual queries is a collective desire for a techno-future that is clean, smooth, relentlessly optimizing, and most importantly, abundant: one that promises to improve individual lives and ease social and political tensions. AI is the technology of our era, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular bring things into focus. Since we use language to connect with one another and to construct the world itself, any investigation into these models necessarily becomes an exploration of our own predicaments. In Issue 66, we lift the hood to peer into the inner working of the machine—and of our own: what we turn to the machine for, and whether we think it can deliver.

Sascha Altman DuBrul knows what it’s like to make meaning out of experiences that are deemed meaningless by others. A long-time organizer in the mad movement, and a therapist himself, DuBrul takes on an often-misunderstood phenomenon: AI psychosis. Mental health systems in the real world can be brutal and pathologizing. In contrast, interactions with the machine can seem frictionless. DuBrul asks whether this frictionless communication is truly helpful for people navigating alternate consciousness. If an LLM can bring one closer to self-knowledge, it must incorporate the insights of those who learned how to make sense of their extreme experiences.