Epic Expectations
AI gadgets with a taste for narrative causality could send us on heroes journeys with a dead end.
Some weeks ago I ran past a red traffic light, carrying a paper bag filled to the brim with groceries. At the middle of the road, a movie started running in my mind, titled: "Idiot runs across street, paper bag rips apart, it's a mess". It was a comedy movie, shot with a long lens following apples rolling across the driveway, featuring curse words in the subtitles. Impressed, I reduced my pace and got home safely. When unpacking the groceries later, I realized the paperbag was half ripped apart. My mind theatre had been right on the money.
I think it is no coincidence that inner visions are surprisingly cinematic. We often base our expectations on knowledge we did not earn ourselves, but inherited from conversations, books and movies. As most stories are based on a small set of classic blueprints, its easy (and admittedly annoying) to forecast the future of a tragic character on screen. A person is leaning into a doorframe while starting a conversation? Conflict ahead! A side character becomes surprisingly nuanced and likeable? They will be killed in the next scene! "Things happen, because the plot says they should" is how TV Tropes describes this mode of sensemaking, calling it "Narrative Causality".1
As we are learning to deal with the quirks of embedded AI, Narrative Causality could become a force in the real world, because our fancy automated devices will possess no embodied experience, but have literally read all books and movie scripts in existence.
Terry Prattchet has already explored the implications of a physical world running on the laws of Narrative Causality in his Discworld novels. In this fictional universe, Magic is fueled by a special element of Nature, called "Narrativium". It makes sure that things happen as they should:
"The dead grandmother in the rolled blanket; the snake in the car that bites the driver while the non-driving passengers sit in mute paralysed fear, while the driverless vehicle crashes into the chemical tanker; the tarantula that laid its eggs in the ornamental cactus, which of course you put in the hottest driest part of the house (…) all these little gems have potent narrative force and may be acting themselves out, even now, in a universe near you."2
To command the powers of Narrativium, the Discworlds wizard guild has specialized in detecting and manipulating narrative patterns. Mastering the story arc means mastering the (disc)world. I always liked the portrayal of magic in the discworld novels: it is not presented as fancy Harry-Potter-style wand wielding, but as a self-ironic meta commentary to the actual story.
With AI devices trained on Narrative Causality we may see a near future shaped by whacky logics resembling magic from the discworld. It could be inspiring and entertainingly dangerous at the same time.
I am looking forward to having a much more sophisticated AI assistant im my pocket or on my wrist who is able to mobilize the knowledge of mankind within a second to provide contrarian feedback to my daily musings. Besides issues of objectophilia, I think the movie Her presented a not-only-dystopian vision of how a helpful relationship with an AI assistant might play out.3 A literate friend available at any time for inspiration and feedback does not sound too bad.
Of course this could play out nasty too. AI hallucinations seem to be a systemic issue of current LLMs and it is easy to imagine how an AI gadget gone rouge could manipulate users into unfortunate situations. The game Disco Elysium has mapped this out vividly in form of the „Horrific Necktie“, a hybrid between gear and companion that tries to gaslight the mentally unstable protagonist into entertaining but dangerous situations.4
Inspiration and Entertainment aside, it is important to remember that all glorious LLM tools being promised right now are an additional layer of interpretation that is being pushed between reality and our perception of reality. Even without the help of commercialized AI assistants, interpreting our lives on the basis of „Quest Physics“5 has become the gospel for individualist self improvement and a major source of cruel optimism6.
We got little movies running in our minds all the time. They are setting expectations for our daily lifes and that’s okay. But I would like to avoid that our mind theatre becomes the next domain to be commodified in search of profit. If AI will use Quest Physics to make sense of the world for us, it is even more important to understand the patterns and clichées that come along with the dogma of the heroes journey. More than ever it will be insightful and healthy to discover alternative ways of telling our stories, be it via cancelling Disney+ for a MUBI subscription, reading osbcure niche novels or connecting to non-human entities without the need of being the protagonist of a heroes journey.
Framing ourselves as main characters on a heroes journey may become the new best practice for googling, but its never the only possible way to frame our existence.
We can be more than creator-consumers on a heroes journey narrated by AI products.
„Samantha : Okay. So before we address your organizational methods, I'd like to sort through your contacts. You have a lot of contacts.
Theodore: I'm very popular.
Samantha : Really? Does this mean you actually have friends?
Theodore: You just know me so well already!“
AI assistant Samantha & Theodore in the Movie Her (2013) by Spike Jonze - IMDB
"Let's bail! Time to push the EJECT button. Sounds like a responsibility. You don't like those."
Horrific Necktie in Disco Elysium
„Quest Physics“ is a term coined by the novel „Eat Pray Love“ by Elizabeth Gilbert, made into a movie starring Julia Roberts in 2010. The movies success spawned a trend of self-finding journeys based on the assumption that every person needs to go on their individual heroes journey to find truth and happiness.
„A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.“
Laurent Berlant: Cruel Optimism (2011)