Hi there! I hope you’re enjoying this well-researched newsletter of tech creativity, oddness, and media fun. If you upgrade, you’ll have full access to the mid-month news section after the intro article, including a new “esoterica & weirdness” bit (which is not just tech!). It would mean a lot if you upgraded, since it takes me at least a full work day off to write each of these suckers! TITAA #51.5: Creepy Puppets See YouElder God Chairs - 3D Culture - Hairy Monsters - Text Tools - Agents with Souls & Biases
Just as the Apple Vision Pro was coming out, I read the old uncanny tale “The Sand-Man” by ETA Hoffman (Gutenberg copy), and was startled to find that it features a creepy seller of spectacles with odd properties and a robot girlfriend. She looks quite good indeed through the lenses: “Now he saw for the first time the regular and exquisite beauty of her features. The eyes, however, seemed to him to have a singular look of fixity and lifelesness. But as he continued to look closer and more carefully through the glass he fancied a light like humid moonbeams came into them. It seemed as if their power of vision was now being enkindled; their glances shone with ever-increasing vivacity.” Nathanael is allowed to court this perfect woman, even though she says nothing but “ach”: "well, well, my dear Mr. Nathanael, if you find pleasure in talking to the stupid girl, I am sure I shall be glad for you to come and do so.” He abandons his human girlfriend because he thinks the clockwork woman listens well. I recommend the Weird Studies podcast ep on the story, especially in light of Vision Pro and today’s romantic chatbots, although the episode predated these phenomena. (Fyi: “Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show”). Along with the eye thing, you can create your own “persona” for the AVP, which at least one poster has likened to obituary shots in an old paper. Well, AI avatars are nothing new, and they are only getting more sophisticated; and AI voices are now speaking for the dead, too—or rather, are being made to do it. AI puppetry? I wrote 2 weeks ago about AI tools that act like people and vice versa. Now I’m thinking about puppets as a useful metaphor. Puppets are tremendously uncanny, of course. Kenneth Gross wrote a book about that very thing: Puppet, An Essay on Uncanny Life. It’s beautifully written, an absolute gem of ethnographic accessible writing. Some quotes from the intro:
He observes that puppeteers themselves are often wanderers, outcasts, seen as fools or charlatans, doing a low-class job of second rate theater, maybe only for donations in a park. But with that comes license to tell stories denied to higher-status forums or to “real actors.” The dolls that witches stuck pins into were called “puppets,” too. The objects themselves feel as if they hold a semblance of life, but not quite—and there the creep factor sets in. Their motion is unreal, jerky, and this disturbs. They may have no physicality at all, be only suggestions: shadows, literally, floating on walls. No one wants to be a puppet; it suggests you have no will and are controlled by someone else. But we sure want to make AI agents do things for us! I have no doubt I’ll say more about this book again, which is fantastic. As I was reading it, I was also finishing TL Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone, which has a very chilling puppet bit:
This puppet “came alive” after being fed by her childhood love and a bit of bad luck. And now holds her captive by the cord on her neck. If you want to look at more metaphoric lenses for uncanny AI creations, I’ve written about monsters and golems, tulpas and egregores in past issues. Down below there are a bunch of related AI puppet initiatives, including the “Open Souls” project in the agents section, antagonistic LLMs, a glitch token repo (from obsessive LLMs), and some other agent craziness. Plus more esoterica/weirdness including Mesopotamian dream tablets, Bigfoot hunting and Bulgarian goat man costumes, 3D heritage collections, latent animation, and a bunch of text creativity stuff. It’s a banger. Please subscribe so as not to miss these epic mid-month collections! TOC (links on the web view):
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