AI, gods and shamans

Lee Eun-hye

The author is the CEO of the publishing house Geulhangari.

Individuals today routinely confront enormous forces. The biggest, of course, is artificial intelligence, which is both technology and history. AI arrived in publishing about a decade later than in the world of Go. Yet before I could work out how to survive as an editor, reports emerged that a substantial stake in my publisher’s parent company might be sold to an AI startup. Publishers around me and I are becoming entangled with AI far faster and more deeply than expected.

When a wave hits, there are two seemingly contradictory ways to survive: confront it or evade it. If AI companies seek to rapidly absorb publishers’ texts to expand themselves, ownership and management structures in publishing will inevitably be shaken. One option is to shrink to the scale of independent publishing and survive tenaciously. Such a retreat may preserve a small publisher, but it cannot by itself sustain the scale needed to protect the future of writers and translators or keep publishers firmly in command of the intellectual work of making books. Yet I do not want to abandon an industry large enough to retain control over planning and editing books while safeguarding the futures of authors and translators.

At the same time, we need what may look like avoidance: keeping some distance from AI and delving into the immaterial by immersing ourselves in reading and writing.

For me, as for some others, study is the most convincing way to traverse the AI era. Plato’s “Theaetetus” (c. 369 B.C.) contains a passage that seems to support this strategy. People engaged in Socratic dialogue come to dislike themselves through inquiry and seek refuge in philosophy to escape that self. Philosophers thereby find perhaps the most successful way of “becoming someone else.” By taking a detour away from AI, now a governing principle of our age, we may instead discover a growing inner light.

Those seeking distance from the present need history. In “Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination” (2024), anthropologist Webb Keane examines fieldwork involving spirit mediums and diviners to consider how humans might deal wisely with robots and AI. He also explores peoples in Malaysia and Indonesia who communicate with cattle or horses.

Widening his perspective across time and cultures, Keane distinguishes animals as near-humans, robots as quasi-humans and AI, spirits and shamans as superhumans. AI can pose as a god today because people treat it like one. The attitude resembles the way humans respond to inscrutable beings such as spirits and shamans.

One conclusion Keane reaches is that writing’s most important dimension is immaterial and internalized by writers and readers. Only by making writing part of ourselves can we read and write fluently. Writing may be a cognitive tool invented by others, but it becomes part of our own cognitive apparatus.

If, in connecting to the world through AI, we surrender control of immaterial language, the things of the world may themselves fall into confusion. Writers and scholars including Laura Riding demonstrated that speed is often best answered with precision, and the material with abstraction. What humanity needs now is intellectual precision and artistic achievement.

Adapting to a future in which AI dominates publishing and stepping away from it to build resistance can happen simultaneously. Learning to distinguish and live with those contradictory forces may sustain us. We may be swept along by one while holding on, through the other, to time, memory, faith in existence and morality.

Keane’s ultimate question in thinking about animals, AI and gods is how far humanity’s moral imagination can expand. Discovering possibilities beyond our narrow, precipitous present will depend greatly on how much meaning humans can give contradictory beings — animals and gods, robots and AI — how we interact with them socially and how deeply we can reflect on them ethically.