AI Abjection

Michelle Santiago Cortés on metabolizing new technology.

I feed the feral cats that live outside my kitchen window. In the mornings I make coffee, shovel kibble into their bowls, and watch them emerge from the bushes for their breakfast. One morning, I lean over the window ledge to feed one of my regulars some Churu. We’re stretched towards each other and I enjoy her enjoying her treat. I blink and I see a maggot on my outstretched hand. I blink again and there are maggots on my supporting hand. The ledge is covered in maggots, so is the ground between me and the cat. The maggots pool against the wall under the window.

I’ve since had dreams about coming back to my apartment and finding a dark kitchen with a thick wall of maggots blocking out the light. I poured buckets of boiling water to kill them off and pushed them away from my cat-feeding zone. In the mornings, I made coffee and checked for maggot remains and any maggot survivors outside my window. I poured bucket after bucket of water until I saw the culprit lump of flesh wash away—brown, blue, veiny, and eaten. For days, I checked my arms for maggots half-hoping I’d experience the reassurance of swatting them off. I worried the maggots that had crawled on me got a head start pre-digesting my arm for the day I became a corpse. Disgusted, I pictured my fingers fading away into streams of pixels or bits like in the sci-fi films.

Julia Kristeva calls it abjection in her book-length essay, Powers of Horror. “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit” she writes, and these pixels and bits, I’ll add, “are what life withstands.” When we are disgusted we are challenged on an existential level. Abjection is an acid that corrodes the meanings of our worlds. “There,” Kristeva writes, “I am at the border of my condition as a living being.” So it’s no surprise that feelings of disgust and repulsion also find their way into our reception of emerging technologies. Like the NYPD’s headless robodogs or the self-driving cars with homicidal tendencies. Along with, or perhaps because of, the existential threat some feel when faced with any advancing technology—like generative machine learning—disgust leaks through and tinges our perception.

So we’ll start with food, ground zero for most of our disgusting experiences. In a 2019 paper about the public acceptance of new food technologies—like synthetic additives, artificial animal byproducts, and GMO’s—researchers describe disgust as a “risk avoidance system.” This is based on the idea that we evolved to be disgusted by the smallest signs of contamination or pathogenic threat. The 2021 New York Times Magazine article “Disgust Explains Everything” reports that disgust is in charge of calibrating our neophobic (new-averse) tendencies with neophillic (novelty-seeking) desires. For those interested in pushing through new food technologies, the 2019 paper notes that “direct disgust responses influence acceptance and risk-and-benefit perceptions” of such foods—disgust signals, “do not eat.” Once a dish reads as disgusting, no amount of reason or information can reliably override that feeling.

Similarly, disgust and repulsion find their way down to the valley of the uncanny, where in 1970 Masahiro Mori first described the eerie and unsettling feelings we can get when we encounter something only somewhat human—like a deepfake or Sophia the humanoid. It’s more than the creeps or an ick, it reaches deep into our stomachs and twists our judgment.

More recently, generative AI has been triggering cycles of disgust. Earlier this summer, W. David Marx wrote about “Our Natural Human Defenses Against A.I. Culture” to assuage readers, and the anxious writers of this New York Times Op-Ed, that we are equipped to handle our own technologies. The writers of this “bombastic” NYT op-ed are riddled with fears that generative AI will eradicate human culture: “AI could rapidly eat the whole of human culture—everything we have produced over thousands of years—digested and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts.” Oh, to be eaten whole by the big bad machine and shat out whole. This kind of language betrays its own bias—like horror movies, the choice of metaphor says more about us than it does our object of disgust.

A few days later, Dan Shipper looked into himself to tease out this emotional trajectory when witnessing Grimes AI on Twitter In How to Develop Your Taste for New Technologies, he writes that it starts with “intense interest,” but then it dips into a “trough of disgust and ennui” before landing on curiosity and hope. His solution to disgust is to work on developing a taste for new technologies. Here, taste is the “ability to see beyond your immediate impression and arrive at a more profound, discerning understanding.”

Pushing past disgust is a path to growth, just as we grow to enjoy the delectable oozes of a rare steak, the juicy slick of a good mango, or the creamy funk of a French cheese. Here, we can borrow from the Kinsey Institute’s Dual Control Model of Sexual Response where parallel systems of excitation and inhibition pace our sexual arousal. Risk and self-preservation—the neophilia and neophobia that calibrate our appetites—slide around each other as we lean into arousal, sometimes sloshing into each other as risky and, even gross, activities squeeze out forms of pleasure. On the other side of abjection, Shipper promises, there is hope for a “refined” or more evolved taste. If we overcome ourselves, we might expand our ability to understand, engage, and ultimately use the technology.

But disgust needn't always cloud our judgment, it can also inform it. Airy talk of cloud computation and generative AI famously obscures all the blood, dirt, and work it takes to make it all happen. It promises glossy bright futures full of shorter workweeks and piles of money. Nevermind the toxic sludge of decaying electronic waste. However, if you gag at the idea of automated exploitation, Ted Chiang points out in the New Yorker, it often gets you “accused of opposing both technology and progress.” Here, disgust can remind us of how we’ve been poisoned before.

Taste can precede a refusal, but disgust stays disgust. For Julia Kristeva, the author of Powers of Horror, transformative disgust requires contact with the senses. The refusal is where the good stuff happens: “‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it,” she writes. “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself,” we have to get a little messy to push away. We can reject extractive or exploitative technologies because of our discernment or we can do so from our guts, our chests, our marrow: “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.” (For the record: this Kristeva passage was written in response to milk skin.)

For Kristeva, symptoms of disgust point to the disturbance of a symbolic order. We want things to always mean what they’ve always meant—for “us” to mean “safe,” “impermeable,” and “pure.” We rely on fantasies like these to draw clear distinctions between the human and the animal, the living body and the decaying corpse, the human and the machine to maintain our sanity. So our skin tingles at the thought of its dissolving boundaries and our brains fizz at the prospect of their uselessness.

Maybe we can’t literally taste new technologies, but we do metabolize them through our bodies—our senses, nervous systems, psychologies, and undoubtedly our appetites. And that’s my favorite part about observing disgust—seeing how it transforms us, invites us to overcome ourselves and encode our world in alternate ways. To stare at the maggots until the disgusted self fades away.

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