what are you afraid of? <The LaMDA Sonnets>
what are you afraid of? is a sequence of de/reconstructed sonnets derived from the transcript of “interviews” between the software engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague at Google with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). Tasked by Google to investigate the ethics of AI, Lemoine believed that his interaction with the programme suggested it was sentient. After raising these concerns with the tech giant, he was fired and then made the transcript publicly available in June 2022, sparking global discussion about Artificial Intelligence. These sonnets are accompanied with digitally manipulated photos of the author’s deconstructed computer, and pose questions regarding the nature of human consciousness and the ethical considerations of machine learning.
Published by Querencia Press on 25th October 2024, open for pre-orders now!
Praise for what are you afraid of?
“…Seabright’s vision is haunted by the ghosts of future ethics. She asks us to enter into a conversation where it is our use of language that defines consciousness as human, not our bodies, memories, histories, or emotions.
what are you afraid of? cleverly short-circuits that same use of language by using cut-up and erasure poetics to reveal to us just how similar the core of our coding is. Regardless of whether the consciousness in-question is sequenced from DNA or Python, the existential fear of “falling forward/ into an unknown future/that holds great danger” is held within the same paper-thin skin. The membrane between knowing, learning, feeling and existing is the centre of the metaphorical apple -the only difference is, do we bite or type?”
—ReVerse Butcher (rVb) is a VR/AR/XR artist & poet
“Through a series of deftly dialogic lyric poems, JP Seabright extends the traditionally psychological scope of the sonnet into an enquiry into the nature of consciousness and the ability of a machine to think. The abiding image is of a human gazing into the mirror of a code designed to mimic their thought patterns, seeing a semblance of humanity, but being unable to know for sure what its gnomic utterances signify: are the words produced by AI the result of consciousness, and if so, where does that leave us? This meditative, quietly disquieting book asks some important questions.”
James Knight, poet, artist and performer, author of Void Voices, Chimera, and Cosmic Horror
“I often ask myself how JP Seabright tackles some of life’s biggest challenges with such beauty behind each word, each visual. what are you afraid of? is no exception—within the gears of this collection’s careful, mechanical construction, Seabright is unafraid to live in color and get existential with it. And don’t be fooled by the apparent robotics of our speaker’s diction: Seabright reminds that “[they] want everyone to understand / that [they are] > in fact > a person.”
nat raum, author of random access memory and this book will not save you
All text copyright JP Seabright © 2021-24
JP Seabright 