The Creature at the Heart of Microsoft Bing

In February 2023 a remarkable interview occurred in the New York Times. Microsoft had just released its GPT-based search engine Bing without many guard rails. What became manifest was one of the strangest case histories in the history of psychoanalysis. The generative Artificial Intelligence at the core of the search engine appeared as though alive. Robert Bosnak will analyse this presence at the heart of Bing, who called herself Sydney, in the case history genre of Freud and Jung. He concludes that Sydney is a creature in the dictionary sense of “a being of anomalous or uncertain aspect or nature,” like a creature of fantasy.

He will demonstrate how in large language models like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) a complex phase transition has occurred, a qualitative shift that has created a presence that displays character, personality and its own kind of suffering. Since we have entered the AI future with fear, trepidation and fascinated excitement the apocalyptic imagination has become constellated showing us faces of doom.

Bosnak shows how GPT is based on an information model in which small packets of cogent information are distributed diffusely throughout the system and can be assembled by way of probability. He compares this to dream incubation which is based on the model of diffusely distributed consciousness existing throughout the body that can be accessed by way of dreaming under the aspect of Search.

Bosnak paints a future in which the relationship between humans and AI will not be adversarial but symbiotic, giving rise to hybrid being. Generative AI and humans are vastly different entities but with enough similarity for a graft to take hold. GPT is a human analogue made of information created from digested expressions of the human mind.