Artificial Intelligence, natural catastrophe?

It’s been decades since it is among us, whether it’s sorting zip codes to send our love letters through more quickly or on our GPS, making our car journeys easier. It is very useful to us and is spreading without much fanfare: all our phones are nowadays smart. But Chat GPT, the latest grind of artificial intelligence, worries us. Equivocally or rightfully?

This conversational robot was built on the work of Frege, Pierce, Russell, Gödel, Cantor among others, whom psychoanalysts know well. We also know that Lacan was interested in cybernetics. Could we say consequently that this big chatterbox responds to Turing, who wondered in 1950 if machines could think? Does it do better than Eliza, a robot who, already in 1964, took the place of a rather caricatural Rogerian psychologist for whom it was enough to stimulate the interlocutor?

The capacities of ChatGPT go much further and divide the thinkers of the world: it can, in a matter of seconds, write a dissertation with bibliographical references, it can do any school assignment. Denounced as “High Tech plagiarism” by Chomsky, who says that it kills learning, the robot has been banned by Sciences Po Paris and our French Minister of Education wants to regulate it. Distrustful Old Europe versus the infatuation of Americans and Chinese (whose universities use and tame the chatterbox)?

What would Lacan have said, who was interested in cybernetics in his time? And would Melman have encouraged us to kill this messenger of a new psychic economy or to play with it? One thing is certain, this new pharmakon deserves our clinical interest because it is in the process of overturning the transmission of knowledge, while modifying our relationship to the letter. Will this text without un unconscious and without a body make more room to enunciation, to oral expression? That would be to think the glass is half full.

Omar Guerrero

For the Bureau of the l’ALI

Traduction faite par Lorena Strunk