Cassandras of the Underground: Dostoevsky against 'AI'

• In Event: Dostoevsky in the Digital Age

Abstract

Can, or should, we live in a world of our own making? This question lies near the heart of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and the advent of generative AI tools is raising it in urgent new ways. Although large language models perform a process that has little to do with writing (or language), their outputs mimic our conventions, reflect our stereotypes, and engage our fantasies. Generative AI can thus seem bound to fulfill the gloomiest prophecies of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “Even being human is a burden to us—individuals with real flesh and blood of our own. We are ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace, and we strive to become some kind of unprecedented ‘generic human beings [obshchechelovekami].’ […] Soon we’ll come up with some way to be born from an idea.” While he is keenly alive to his own existence in a body that exceeds all conventions and formulas, the Underground Man sees little hope of escaping their threat—and his blindness is most clearly visible to a reader who sees beyond the body toward the immortal soul. In this paper, I will consider Notes from Underground as a revealing lens on the pseudo-language of “AI,” and “AI” (in turn) as a lens on the narrowness of Dostoevsky’s Christian humanism. I will ask whether we can read Dostoevsky against “AI” without embracing his foundational religious assumptions, and how those assumptions emerge in new ways when we read Notes from Underground for the Janus-faced figure of the “obshchechelovek.”

Author

• Chloe Kitzinger, Columbia U