MEGHAN O'GIEBLYN Could a machine have an unconscious? “The potential for malicious use was so obvious that OpenAI, the lab that made it, agreed to grant access to only a handful of well-vetted researchers, spurring the publicity-friendly lore that it was “too dangerous to release.” “IT WAS FIRST DESCRIBED to me by a friend who works in the industry as autocomplete on crack, after the technology that endowed our phones with the quality everyone pretends to, but does not actually, want in a lover — the ability to finish your thoughts. Instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, GPT-3 would produce several paragraphs in whatever style it intuited from your prompt.”

Could a machine have an unconscious? "GPT-3 is a natural language processing algorithm. It belongs to a new generation of AI models called Transformers, a technology whose early iterations were named after Sesame Street characters (BERT, ELMO, GROVER), as though the somewhat frightening allusion to children’s television could be mitigated with a softer, more educational one. "

Mechanical metaphors for the unconscious would evolve alongside modern technologies. Freud spoke of the drives as hydraulic; Lacan envisioned the deepest level of the psyche as algorithmic.