ChatGPT and Midjourney is what Frank Herbert Warned us About
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune
Spoilers for the Dune series
On it’s surface the Butlerian Jihad is a writing tool. An event used to handwave the existence of AI and computers. With this tool Frank Herbert can instead focus on his themes, instead of speculating on the progress of technology. As the story unravels though his themes about the human mind and technology start to unfold.
In college I wrote an 8 page paper about the Dune series and it’s themes. How heroes, messiahs, and politics allow the powerful to control people. There is a subtler theme, the power of the human mind, plus drugs. When travelling through the stars a flight computer isn’t used like in other sci-fi stories, a navigator or human juiced to the gills on Spice plots the route in his/her head. When the people of the Dune universe need to make a complex calculation they use mathematic savants, known as mentats. When some needs a medical exam they don’t go to a computer but a human doctor.
There is ample evidence that exploring the thinking machines was Frank Herbert’s next goal. The machines would be something humanity turned to to do our thinking for us. Thinking machines controlled space travel, medicine, business, trade, and government. People had started to depend on these thinking machines far too much.
As the quote above lays out, the machines weren’t the only ones at fault. It was also the men who controlled them. The current people in charge at OpenAI seem to have no interest in putting any restraints on the AI, opting instead to make sure ChatGPT and Midjourney don’t say or do anything bigoted (User’s often bypass these bias, case in point Dan.) People train Midjourney on other people’s art work without their permission, and train deep fake voices on voice actors without hiring them. It’s easier and cheaper to ask an AI to do something than to hire a human being to do the work for you.
Another theme in Frank Herbert’s writing is social engineering. The people of Arrakis are continually preyed upon and manipulated to fit other peoples needs. OpenAI trained ChatGPT with certain biases in place. Students are using ChatGPT to write their essays, poems, and any other sort of short answers. What happens when only certain information gets fed to the machine? What happens when biased information gets propagated, and everything else gets thrown out? ChatGPT can “social engineer” with these biases. ChatGPT should not be the primary method to research, collate, and convey ideas. That should be reserved for a human mind.
I understand a lot of this essay may be “old man shouts at sky.” I understand that the genie that is AI has already been let out of the bottle. It’s never going back in. This article is largely me expressing my concerns over the advancements in AI. My goal with this article is bring awareness to Frank Herbert’s themes and convince people that their is still value in the human mind before we are all stuck doing menial labor. My worries and concerns about AI run far deeper, and the list I linked to bothers me more than I can put into words. The human experience should be more than fixing cars and washing dishes for our AI and tech bro overlords.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” -Orange Catholic Bible, Butlerian Jihad, Dune
My name is Michael Vincent Hawthorne, writer for the Midnight Variety Hour. I also write about entertainment and politics, so feel free to check out my other works and maybe give me a follow.
