As with the Encyclopédie, the value of AI depends entirely on knowing how to use it.
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Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence, like Diderot's eighteenth-century enterprise, orders chaotic knowledge and entrusts its meaning to individual use. It is a collective, automatic and often anonymous technology, a mirror of a new enlightened process.
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It is possible that, surprisingly, artificial intelligence – of which Foglio AI provides periodic artistic proof – characterizes ours as an age of enlightenment, in the sense that Kant gave it at the end of the eighteenth century: not an enlightened age, in which a process of ignition of minds was completed, but rather characterized by the inexorable advance of that process. The enlightenment, seen from here, seems in fact to have moved on the basis of three principles that can equally characterize today's AI: encyclopedism, automatism and anonymity.
Despite a vulgate that tries to flatten the Enlightenment to rebellious thought, and as such father of the great revolutions of his century, what Robert Darnton called "the great affair of the Enlightenment" was rather an attempt to systematize a chaotic knowledge, namely the Encyclopédie. Exactly like the AI, the project of Diderot and d'Alembert was born from the need to put order in a knowledge that with the progress of knowledge had become insurmountable, as well as from the ambition to structure it according to a univocal interpretative line that selected the sources; all this allowing the reader to build an individual knowledge by hopping between the innumerable entries available, according to an infinity of possible combinations. The idea of the alphabetical order, a novelty for the time, is all here: not to reflect the world by presenting a pre-ordered system based on a hierarchy of knowledge, but rather by making available a universal interactive tool, in which the reader is called to do half the work . As with the Encyclopédie, the value of AI depends entirely on knowing how to use it.
Although we are prey to the instinct to identify it with the great names of the immortals – Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu… –, the Enlightenment was above all the work of low-level workers, infinite streams of negligible and rehashed texts that came from the pens of authors now completely forgotten. The Encyclopédie, in this respect, was almost a first experiment in automatic writing, no more and no less than what we see happening before our eyes by giving prompts to the AI. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for a figure like the Chevalier Jaucourt, a nobleman in poverty who joined the champions of the Encyclopédie, writing just under twenty thousand entries on the most disparate subjects. One of two things: either Jaucourt was omniscient or, more likely, he acted as the AI does today, mechanically copying and recycling what he managed to find, putting it together with the style that had been imposed on him by Diderot's prompts. Sure enough, today Jaucourt would use ChatGpt; moreover, today Jaucourt would be ChatGpt.
I say Diderot because it was he who, as director, completed the publishing enterprise that began in 1751 and, after a thousand vicissitudes, saw the last volume come out only in 1772, decades after d'Alembert's Prospectus of Human Knowledge. Like the AI, the Encyclopédie was an uncontrollable novelty and, like the AI, it also smelled like a scam, given that the subscribers had been promised eight volumes but twenty more were released. Above all, Diderot and d'Alembert were no more its authors than Sam Altman can be considered the author of what ChatGpt writes; so much so that, on the frontispiece, they ascribed the work to a “société de gens de lettres” which today could be translated as “association of intellectuals” and which meant everyone and no one. The Encyclopédie thus exalted and institutionalized anonymity, the true cornerstone of the Enlightenment. In order to circulate ideas in a context of rigid moral and political control over content – not dissimilar to today, in some ways – it was common practice at the time to print texts without a signature, to circulate them in manuscripts never available for printing, to attribute entire books to people who had been dead for some time . Today, to ensure the same freedom, the Enlightenment would add the wording “text composed with AI” to what they wrote.
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