Jørgen Veisland (Bio)

Claude‘s Constitution: Matter and form as artifice

Anthropic‘s associate Dr. Amanda Askell is teaching the AI model Claude to know the difference between right and wrong. The experiment has epistemological, ethical and aesthetical implications. As evidenced in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Even were forbidden by God to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Ill but Eve proceeded to transgress the interdiction, thus fulfilling God‘s own implicit, subconscious desire and, by extension, Eve’s and Adam‘s desire for knowledge. The liberation of knowledge by Eve instituted what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus call “non-coded flows of desire” which “introduce disorder and revolution into the socius”.

Dr. Askell’s epistemological cum ethical experiment has aesthetic implications. Martin Heidegger‘s The Origin of the Work of Art relates “thingliness” to form, stating that “ [...] the permanence of a thing, its constancy, consists in matter remaining together with form. The thing is formed matter”. Heidegger goes on to claim that the artwork resembles “the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is never forced into being”.

We may deduce, now, that the artwork is a natural product, created by the spontaneous confluence of matter and form. The unity of content and form in aesthetic works is determined by the non-coded flow of the desire for knowledge. Now the following question arises: Is Anthropic’s and Dr. Askell‘s Claude a natural thing in Heidegger’s conception of the term, and, by extension, does Claude possess a natural knowledge of good and ill, achieved through a transgression involving disorder and revolution? Further, may Claude‘s Construction be conceived as a natural aesthetic-ethical relation conducive to insight into complex social and political, as well as personal problematics? Is the artifice of Claude a sublimation of desire, and is it to be viewed as a transcendence of the natural-artificial dialectical opposition? The answer to these questions are dubious to say the least but we may tentatively conclude that artifice could possibly constitute an evolutionary step forward.