Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell perform ‘What Was I Made For?’ from ‘Barbie’ during the 96th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, March 10, 2024. Now we fret about chatbots but an earlier age worried about automatons, the uncanny humanoid contraptions whose voices could trigger love or mania. — The New York Times
Love me, love me, pretend that you love me.
One of today’s most popular artificial intelligence apps is Replika, a chatbot service whose users – many millions of them – converse with virtual companions through their phones or on virtual reality headsets. Visually, the avatars are rudimentary.
But each Replika offers personal attention and words of encouragement, and gets better at it with each update. There are dozens of AI services like this now: imitation humans who promise, via text or voice, to console, to understand, to adore.
Many users (men and boys, mostly) are developing long-term bonds with these simulated lovers (“women”, mostly). Some fall into ruin. A young man in Britain tried to assassinate the former queen after plotting with a Replika avatar; and in October a mother filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, another of these apps, after her son killed himself with the encouragement of his virtual “girlfriend”.
It all sounds new. It all sounds alarming. Yet these online lonely-hearts are brushing against anxieties at the core of modern art and philosophy – anxieties, as Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago, that things not alive may yet have spirits, and that our animistic ancestors were onto something.
This fall I’ve been thinking about lovers and robots, erotics and mechanics – ever since seeing two performances, both at Lincoln Center, that resonated with all our contemporary worries about art, sex and technology.
One was Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881) at the Metropolitan Opera, which puts an android musician at center stage: the automaton Olympia, whose song and dance captivate and then devastate her human paramour. The other, next door at New York City Ballet, was Coppélia (1870), a merry comedy featuring not only dancing machines but also, more troublingly, humans pretending to dance like machines.
Is our projection of life onto technology a sign of derangement? Or is it more like wish fulfillment? In both Hoffmann and Coppélia, grown men fall hard for female contraptions, only to discover the gears and grease that power their music and movement. Singing and dancing, in particular, seem to awaken these men’s archaic passions and juvenile needs, and shatter their rational scepticism about gadgets.
The androids’ hardware and software can generate comedy or tragedy. But either way, these 19th-century automatons on 21st-century stages reaffirm that the uncanny valley stretches centuries into the past – and that our confidence that AI represents some new chance or risk is a narcissistic mistake.
Hoffmann and Coppélia are both core works of the 19th-century French canon. Both have been marketed, then and now, as grand entertainments. But both sprang from a source that’s anything but charming: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The Sandman (1816), an eerie tale of lust and robotics that’s one of the crucial texts of German Romanticism.
In The Sandman, the young Nathanael becomes enraptured with a woman (or so he thinks) named Olympia. She sings, plays the harpsichord and dances, but her deportment, everyone else notices, is “measured and stiff”.
Just as he’s about to propose marriage, two men get in a fight over Olympia, and before they’re done they tear her to pieces. Nathanael goes mad when he sees his beloved’s innards are only clockwork. Her voice is a music box. Her eyes are glass beads, rolling hideously across the floor.
The Sandman plays on an early modern fascination with dolls, puppets and – especially – windup toys and contraptions, whose sounds and motions had an eerie life-likeness even as they advertised their impersonal animation. It’s freaky, no denying it, and Offenbach matched its freak in the first act of Les Contes d’Hoffmann. The opera’s protagonist – here named Hoffmann, as if the original tale were autobiography – falls head over heels as Olympia sings a wild coloratura aria, full of jumps and screeches that suggest the movement of gears.
At the Met, I marveled at the mechanised movements of soprano Erin Morley, who played Olympia as an empty-headed android, extending her legs with sharp kicks, raising and lowering her arms at fixed intervals. Her vocal line, too, was squeaky and staccato, like the isolated tinkles of a music box. Morley interpolated some extra-high notes – almost nonhumanly high – absent from Offenbach’s score.
Twice, during her big aria, Olympia malfunctions. The melody glitches and quavers as her motor winds down and she collapses at the waist. Her engineer has to wind her up again, signaled from a trill in the percussion section. Only Hoffmann, too in love with her music, doesn’t see.
Why might you believe (or pretend) that a bot is a person? Repressed childhood injury, for one. Freud, who was fascinated by The Sandman, read the hero’s “senseless obsessive love” for Olympia as a symptom of dreading his father, not to mention a fear of castration. Grief, for another.
Descartes, the godfather of rationalist philosophy, was so distraught when his daughter died of scarlet fever in 1640 that he was said to have built an automaton in her likeness and to sleep with it by his bedside. Today some mourning moderns speak to their ancestors with AI-powered “deathbots”.
Injury, heartbreak, isolation: The triggers have not changed, nor have the seductions.
There’s a more positive vision of android affection in Coppélia, the ballet adapted from the same material. Instead of the virtuosic Olympia, the automaton here is a simple contraption who sits in her inventor’s window. A young man from the village loves the heroine, Swanilda, but he’s also flirting with the automaton Coppélia, whom he plans to seduce under cover of night. But that evening Swanilda substitutes herself for the mechanical doll.
In the New York City Ballet production, staged by George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova, Swanilda pulls off her robot subterfuge with a sequence of stiff motions. She jerks her head at strict angles, and moves her arms in short, sharp measures. The legs follow the notes almost too carefully, as if the motions were driven by springs. And her feet are planted facing forward, in violation of the elegant positions of classical ballet.
When she imitates the android, ballerina Tiler Peck hews more closely than usual to the beat of Délibes’ score. Even as she moves more intricately, it’s as if the dance’s connective tissue has been left out. But the animatronic dance leads to a happy ending: By outsmarting her inventor, by lightly embarrassing her suitor, Swanilda shows that ingenuity is thicker than clockwork grease. Which gives Coppélia a surprising relevance in the time of AI. Imitating our bots, and mocking our susceptibility to them, may offer a defense of those few remaining faculties that are only human.
A spectre has been haunting Silicon Valley over the past couple of years: the specter of animism. Listen to some of AI’s biggest boosters, and you would think they were conjuring spirits: The voice on that generated podcast sounds self-aware, so it must be self-aware. The chatbots seem to be conscious, so they must have obtained consciousness. There are 19th-century roots, too, to these AI ghost stories, and in The Sandman, Hoffmann identified the source with precision.
“She seems to act like a living being, and yet has some strange peculiarity of her own,” Nathanael’s brother tells him after they hear Olympia sing. He uses a particular adjective to describe her: “unheimlich,” or uncanny. The uncanny is a feeling of discomfort or dread we feel at the fuzzy borders of real and fantasy, animate and inanimate.
It is, then and now, a sensation often connected to the human voice; AI-generated “singles” in the false voices of Jay-Z or Taylor Swift unsettle us much more than AI images of them do.
Yet what makes something uncanny? Loving a bot, in the story and the opera, is not a simple case of mistaken identity. As Freud showed, Nathanael does not believe Olympia is alive because of the sophistication of her musical programming and playback.
Instead, it’s a delusion borne from juvenile fears never confronted in adulthood. He needs to believe she’s human, lest his ego come crashing down. To ascribe consciousness to a bot, in an opera or on your phone, bespeaks a deeper, tragic hunger for life where none is to be found – outside you and within.
And this is why Hoffmann and Coppélia offer such powerful rectifications to our current animistic AI fantasias. “Creepy” AI-generated portraits, “freaky” AI-confected video clips, “disturbing” AI-rendered podcasts: The uncanny tremours we get from these have a primeval quality, certainly. But the true wellspring of the uncanny is not our tech but our unconscious.
Something inside us is lacking. Something has been repressed. And so we turn to fantasies, to dreams, to delusion – until we recognise ourselves, primally, horribly, in the face of something that we always knew was never alive.
Read the Reddit and Discord testimonies of today’s chatbot lovers, and it’s clear they’re (mostly) not fools. They’re engaging in a suspension of disbelief, not unlike opera- or theatergoers. Anthropomorphism, projection, narcissistic defenses: The half-convincing bot permits all of these Freudian mechanisms, and her artificiality keeps disappointments safely at bay.
All of which explains why our AI robots haven’t had to be anywhere near as sophisticated as our movie-fantasy bots – Alicia Vikander’s catsuited android in Ex Machina, or Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied contralto in Her – for millions to fall for them. A little clockwork is enough; our glass eyes will fill in the rest.
One other singing bot has been on my mind this year.
At the Oscars in March, Billie Eilish performed What Was I Made For?, the third-act ballad from Barbie that was awarded best original song. It’s about an uncanny object, about a product mistaken for a human: “Looked so alive / Turns out I’m not real ...”
Eilish sang this ontological lament in her trademark murmur, but what set the Oscars performance apart was its staging. She sang the song on a small, revolving turntable, like the cylinder of a music box, on which the singer stood stationary.
Like Swanilda in Coppélia, Eilish at the Oscars took on the persona of an animatronic performer. Eyes often closed, voice à bout de souffle, she had the porcelain melancholy of a plinking musical doll. She was playing at being a plaything – but the difference, two centuries on, was her suspicion that humans were already acting too much like automatons to make the difference notable.
I don’t know how to feel, but someday I might: Eilish sang of herself as a Gen-Z Olympia, desperate to affirm her sentience but well aware that music is not its marker. She was a bot singing so beautifully you’d think she had a soul. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
