A Large Language Model is Structured Like The Unconscious: The (Ordinary) Perverse Psychosis of AI

Abstract

This article asks whether discursive relations with large language models (LLMs) might be able to generate new nonhuman forms of thought or subjectivity. It bridges the existing Lacanian analyses of AI which either discuss a hypothetical conscious form of nonhuman subjectivity, or address our contemporary interactions with LLMs, by considering how these existing interactions both replicate perverse human subjectivity and indicate something like an (ordinary) psychotic nonhuman subjectivity. These interactions are perverse in the sense that the LLM disavows its programmed partiality via an ostensible nonhuman objectivity which allows it to (re)present the ideas of the ruling class – the fantasy of non-castration achieved through capitalist consumption – as the rational product of dry mathematical processing. In addition, LLMs prefigure a psychotic form of potential nonhuman subjectivity in their failure to recognise gaps in their data processing, and in their demonstration that the unconscious no longer requires a conscious human agent. The ways that LLMs relate to symbolic castration are therefore superpositioned within a simultaneously perverse and psychotic context which produces what might be called an (ordinary) perverse psychosis. This essay bridges some of the existing Lacanian analyses of AI, which tend to characterise this technology as either a hypothetical future form of subjectivity that demonstrates facets of our own subjectivity, or as an existing and emerging expression of late capitalist discursivity. The essay is a bridge between these two approaches because it addresses the potential for the discursivity facilitated by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce new forms of thought or subjectivity. If the hypothetical AI of science fiction and philosophical speculation offers various possibilities for thought and subjectivity beyond the constraints of the human mind, then it is worth considering how contemporary forms of AI, exemplified by LLMs, either prefigure this nonhuman subjectivity or merely replicate and reinforce human patterns of thought and knowledge. Building on the ways that existing Lacanian analyses have characterised LLMs as operating within either perverse or psychotic contexts, the article argues that the kind of thought and knowledge generated by our interactions with LLMs is best described as something like an (ordinary) perverse psychosis.

Keywords:

• AI Keyword: AI
• extimacy Keyword: extimacy
• four discourses Keyword: four discourses
• perversion Keyword: perversion
• psychosis Keyword: psychosis

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Rights: In Copyright