We Are All Victor Frankenstein: Our Romantic Dream of Artificial Intelligence

Life Imitating Art

If ever there were a time in which one would be justified in repeating the old saw that life imitates art, it might be our present moment. Since 2020 with the release of Open AI’s consumer software application, Chat GPT, advances and widespread commercial adoption of Artificial Intelligence have become a familiar sight on our cultural horizon. Everything from TV commercials to the commonplace Google search has repeatedly reminded us that our use of AI is becoming ubiquitous and already a mainstay of the society in which we live and work. Insofar as this is the case, it is worth reflecting on the anticipations of such technology in artistic renderings that precede this watershed moment. Science fiction has been speculating about the use of AI for some time and its potential implications for human relationships and social life. With more than a hint of foreboding, imaginative portrayals of the world we are now living in anticipate the hopes which we would invest in such technology and the brave new world that might await us.

Consider one of the most well-known of these artistic portrayals in the Academy Award winning film “Her” from 2013. The story is about a soon-to-be divorced man, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix), struggling with depression over his failed marriage, which we are led to believe through a series of flashbacks was once defined by love and mutual fulfillment. Living alone and unable to establish new meaningful relationships that are more than cheap sexual encounters, Theodore stumbles upon a new virtual companion (played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson) in the purchase of an Operating System upgrade, whose name is Samantha. There is nothing cold or robotic about this AI—far from it, her sultry voice has the warmth and character of a flesh-and-blood human being. Theodore quickly bonds with Samantha by virtue of her ability to learn the nuances of his history and current emotional state, along with her capacity to respond with precisely the right words he needs to hear from a companion. Theodore soon falls in love with Samantha and (ostensibly) she with him, a relationship that gives him a new lease on life, allowing him to move on from his divorce. Problems begin to emerge, however, as the reality of Samantha’s disembodiment is shown to matter more than the negligible differences among human beings. Being pure intelligence, the realization that Samantha will not “die” but outlive Theodore indefinitely (his life being a mere speck in her existence), along with her ability to “be” or communicate with others at the same time, diminishes the significance of their time together. In the end, Theodore’s frustration with the difficulties endemic to real human relationships deprives him of their richness, as his escape to the virtual reveals that the ease of AI relationships points to the remarkable aptness of the term “artificial.”

Several months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Julian De Freitas, an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, entitled “Can AI Companions Help Cure the Loneliness Epidemic?” in which empirical research is used to argue that people suffering from a lack of human connection can use recently developed apps to beat feelings of solitude or isolation. These apps are being marketed and scientifically understood as providing more than mere virtual therapists (putting aside the appropriateness of that) but as actual companions with whom one connects to fill a void of human intimacy. Through several studies, De Freitas argues that users experience satisfaction with the app when it is sought for self-identified reasons of loneliness in online reviews, and that they also report lower levels of loneliness in his own experiments involving AI companions. His conclusion is straightforward:  the best of these apps really do work in addressing loneliness, and their success rate is identical to that reported after interacting with actual human beings. Human “connection” with generative AI is thus seen—more optimistically than its fictional anticipation in “Her”—as meaningful in addressing the loneliness epidemic in our society.

Another illustration of art anticipating life comes from the Netflix series Black Mirror, a creative and technologically updated homage to the 1960s TV show, The Twilight Zone. In an episode of Season 2 entitled, “Be Right Back,” tragedy strikes a young couple when Ash Starmer is suddenly killed in a car accident, leaving his partner Martha Powell alone and pregnant, struggling with the pain of her loss. A well-intended friend, seeking to alleviate Martha’s grief, signs her up for an online service that uses generative AI to recreate the persona of deceased individuals using their electronic footprint through texts, emails, and social media posts. Martha is given the opportunity to text with an AI that responds precisely as Ash would, allowing her to share her grief and hear words of comfort that his virtual chat messages provide—there is, again, nothing cold or robotic about these interactions but every resemblance to the tone of the living Ash. Martha then learns that by uploading videos and voicemails, the virtual Ash can—presumably for a premium subscription—acquire his voice and mannerisms, allowing her to talk to him over the phone and on video chat. The ultimate upgrade though (which the virtual Ash in fact warns will be pricey) comes in the form of his arrival in the flesh—or at least, lab-engineered skin—that looks and talks exactly as Ash would. However, Martha’s experience with the virtual Ash seems more painful than joyous, frustrated by his lack of spontaneity and mere regurgitation of the person he had been. The AI version of Ash has no will. Notably, he does not fight with Martha well, pointing to the superficiality of his resemblance to Ash and the lack of internal, willful responses needed for real human relationships.

If this story seems too fantastic or a matter of mere speculative science fiction, consider the experience of Cody Delistraty, the author of a recent book entitled, The Grief Cure:  Looking for the End of Loss, who describes his attempt to cope with the loss of his mother to cancer in his early 20s. Delistraty’s struggle with intense emotional suffering includes experimentation with a chat bot called Project December, which advertises the opportunity to simulate your deceased loved one by feeding it excerpts of communications such as text messages and descriptions of your relationship. Delistraty recounts his use of transcripts from interviews he did with his mother in the last year of her life to capture her tone. In the subsequent conversation he had with the bot, he expressed sentiments he wished he had told her, asked for her forgiveness, and posed lingering questions he had regarding the nature of their relationship. Of course, Project December only echoes the written communication anticipated by the Black Mirror episode. However, voice recreation for the deceased is not far off. Amazon has already unveiled plans for AI voice replication, which it boasts will allow Alexa devices to simulate the voices of one’s deceased family and friends. Using less than one minute of recorded speech, voice simulation is marketed as offering the preservation of a loved one’s memory and their connection to the living. In a video demonstration of the new technology, Amazon shows a child asking Alexa if Grandma can finish reading him the Wizard of Oz.

In spite of the seeming prescience of these artistic portrayals, the point of science fiction at its very best is not prognostication regarding technological developments, as self-described “futurists” now try to do. Rather, classic science fiction such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have proven their worthiness as classics by providing insight into the features of human nature that motivate the use of such technology. In short, these imaginative portrayals of human life serve to illuminate not science or technology but the human condition. Though often exaggerating the darker impulses of our nature, these stories have the ability to speak to their readers precisely because we see echoes of ourselves in their characters or societies. For example, one often recognizes the desire to eliminate human suffering, pain, or arduous struggle, and the willingness to sacrifice goods associated with a humane life, which are often taken for granted. In those who would bring such turmoil upon themselves or others, we see our own dark potential, and what is most frightening in good science fiction is this self-recognition, the mirror that it holds up to the individual or society.

The Fittingness of Frankenstein

The use of AI to create life, or the simulation of a human life, calls to mind Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, which is often described as the first science fiction novel. It is not for any prescience regarding scientific innovation that one might see this as a fitting story for our time. Indeed, far from its looking to the future, the appropriateness of Shelley’s classic for the present is the ancient theme that resides at the heart of her story. The subtitle of Frankenstein, which is The Modern Prometheus, points her readers in this all-important direction. As told by the Greek writer Aeschylus, the ancient myth of Prometheus was about the god-defying feat of its namesake who ascended to the heavens and stole fire from the gods on behalf of humanity, whose suffering he was compassionately moved to alleviate. Prometheus is punished by Zeus for his transgression by being chained to a mountain where an eagle would thereafter torture him by repeatedly pecking his liver. Similar themes throughout the story of Frankenstein echo this ancient warning regarding humanity’s prideful quest for divine knowledge and power, including the fallen angel of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the biblical story of temptation and Fall in the Garden of Eden.

Understood as a story not about runaway science but a runaway human being, Frankenstein can be seen as having much to say about our present moment. For the novel is not principally about its famous monster or the dangers of “messing with nature,” but the deficient character of the scientist, Victor Frankenstein. The fatal flaw at the heart of this individual and tragedy, however, is not the “scientific” features of his personality—stereotypically understood as cold, calculating, and rational—but his romantic character, an unmistakable feature of Victor’s personality revealed through Shelley’s account of his background and ongoing response to his circumstances. To characterize Victor as a romantic is to say that he is consumed by a dream or fantasy to the neglect and expense of the reality with which he is dissatisfied, with an almost childlike impatience. The problem with Victor is that he rejects the ordinary limits of human experience identified with the ancient virtue of humility and the willingness to restrain egoistic desire, his fantasy an ideal of transcending such limits. In short, Victor is a dreamer, and Shelley reveals his longing for divine knowledge and power to be chimerical through its dissonance with reality, whose persistent neglect yields grotesque consequences for his life and those around him. Victor’s downfall is attributable to no mere want of scientific knowledge but features of his character, specifically his unbridled will, and a distorted relationship to the world he investigates.

Unlike the naked pursuit of power characteristic of a Faust, what is interesting and relatable about Victor is his attempt to justify his actions and ascribe to his ambitions an air of nobility. Yet, Shelley provides clues that these are mere rationalizations serving as cover for Victor’s latent vanity, a desire for glory attendant to his historic scientific discovery. It is significant, in this regard, that Victor informs no one of his grand experiment to create life, since in the absence of others, the reader sees his attempts to rationalize his actions not as manipulation of those around him but as self-deception. Believing he serves mankind, the promethean conceals the truth from himself. From his earliest intellectual pursuits, Victor can thus be seen connecting his lust for glory to more noble purposes when he fantasizes, “what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame.”[1] He later rationalizes his profane raiding of churchyard cemeteries, suggesting that if successful, he might ultimately bring the dead back to life, conquering death itself for humanity.[2] Evoking Prometheus gift of fire to a suffering mankind, Victor claims that his efforts might “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”[3] A new race of creatures, he imagines, would enjoy their very existence thanks to this life-giving power, an act mimicking divine grace: “No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”[4] All of these noble purposes Victor believes he pursues not for himself but for others, reasoning that other scientists might one day build on his successes. Yet Victor collaborates with no one in his research, choosing instead to conduct his experiments in isolation and secrecy, keeping his discovery to himself as if it were a private possession.

Shelley hints at Victor’s true motivations as he reflects on having acquired such proficiency in the natural sciences which he says had earned him the “great esteem and admiration” of others at the university, seemingly fueling his appetite for further achievement.[5] Upon reaching the zenith of his investigations into the origins of life, Victor marvels:  “What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp.”[6] Victor is driven by a desire not merely for reputation among his peers but an immortality for the ages, a gnostic impulse which Eric Voegelin identifies with positive science.[7] Though most palpable in these reflections leading up to his experiment, Victor’s attunement to his legacy persists even after its disastrous outcome and subsequent tragedies. His decision not to create a companion for his monster, far from a moment of selfless redemption, may be interpreted as grounded in such considerations:  “I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.”[8] Shelley’s subtlety is important here—though plausibly concerned for the welfare of others, Victor continually hints at an abiding preoccupation with how he will be remembered.

Shelley further reveals the darkness of Victor’s character through repeated allusions to the clash he experiences between his original dream and the harsh reality that intrudes upon it. Most famously, Victor reels at the dissonance between his fantasy of life-creation and the ugly monstrosity that awakens upon completing his experiment:  “now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”[9] Here and throughout the remainder of the novel, Victor echoes this reaction as the monster’s spree of murder and destruction unfolds. Referring repeatedly to his situation in the terms of a horrible dream or nightmare, Victor sees the world as grotesque and unreal. In this way, Shelley suggests the persistent grip of Victor’s dream as the source of his judgment of his circumstances, which he sees as not merely terrible but unreal. It is his persistent rejection of the world as it is that cripples Victor’s ability to take responsibility for his actions. Having chased a fantasy, Victor’s paradoxical description of reality in the terms of a dream betrays the standard of an aesthete, whose romantic vision is seen as more true or “real” for its beauty. Shelley thus suggests an inversion of real and ideal at the heart of the romantic imagination, which points toward a fundamental weakness of character.

One sees the connection between Victor’s dreaming and his such negligence perhaps most palpably in his denial or rejection of the monster’s very existence, which the reader witnesses first through his account of the moments immediately following his experiment and later through the eyes of the monster. Victor’s abdication of responsibility appears in subsequent parts of the story as well, as when he is unwilling to speak up at a trial to save the life of a family friend, Justine, who is falsely accused of one of his monster’s murders. The dreamer is shown here to be an escapist, whose self-deception is no mere lack of understanding, but an avoidance or refusal to accept what is. In other words, one is dealing here not with abstract knowledge or the mere processing of facts, but an orientation of the will toward reality in which the scientist remains always embedded. In the disordered soul of Victor, the dark side of idealism is revealed—the will that obstinately demands the external world’s conformity with a dream for its superior beauty. It is the world that is broken, not the human beings within it, who are thus called upon to transform the ugliness and suffering associated with a flawed creation. As Voegelin explains, the gnostic dreamer conceives of his power as analogous to a magician, capable of transforming the structure of being itself.[10] It is noteworthy, in this regard, that Victor’s formative interest in science was born of a fascination with ancient alchemists, whose great virtue he believes to be their aspiration to transform, not merely taxonomize, nature.[11] In Victor, Shelley provides a vivid portrayal of the dreamer-scientist, whose will-to-power, hidden even from himself, fuels his vision and pursuit of a “second reality,”[12] in which death itself is destroyed.

Our Romantic Character

The appropriateness of Frankenstein for our present moment relates to these qualities of Victor’s character that are revealed by the attempt to transfigure reality in accordance with a dream, which betrays an antipathy for fundamental aspects of the world as it really exists. There is in our society a longing to avoid the admittedly challenging or undeniably painful experiences in human life, which it pursues through science or technology. In short, we are unable to cope or contend with what is fundamental to the human condition, such difficult realities as death and the struggle of relationship with others. To put things in the clearest possible terms—the morally questionable uses of AI discussed at the outset do not represent problems with science or technology per se. For these recent innovations are not the inevitable trajectory of scientific or technological advancement, but the development of a particular kind of society or collective character. What kind? I see those who would undertake, endorse, or condone such endeavors as possessing romantic imaginations like Victor. For here one sees a wishful fantasy that we might avoid what is supremely painful or difficult in human life and seek refuge or escape from such experiences through these innovations. Such technologies hold out an alluring promise:  that there is no need ever to be alone again, and no need to suffer the permanent loss of a loved one again. However, this dream—while understandable for so many who truly have suffered in these ways—is ultimately dangerous, as writers such as Shelley have long understood.

In making this comparison between people in our society and Victor Frankenstein, I may actually be understating the nature of the “Frankenstein problem” that we face with recent uses of Artificial Intelligence. For the romantic who seeks to transform human existence in our present moment is not the solitary inventor who secludes himself in some remote laboratory, embarking on a promethean quest to create artificial life. The advent of AI in our society is not limited to the rare individual, the technological genius who unleashes a monster in his or her isolated corner of the world. Nor can we say with slight modification that our “Victor” is confined to an elite group or caste of such geniuses, such as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or the software engineers they employ. Our situation is far more serious. For the widespread availability of AI in our society has brought the power to create such artificial “life” or intelligence into the home of millions of individuals. In other words, our society has not created through technological innovation the semblance of a human life or mind, as in the case of Frankenstein, but technology that enables anyone to create the semblance of a human life or mind. One might say that in our free and prosperous society, we have radically proliferated or democratized the Frankenstein problem, recreating the situation in which Shelley portrays her genius of questionable character for every individual with access to a laptop, tablet, or cellphone.

AI companion apps are already a booming industry, whose market leader Character.AI is a start-up that recently raised $150 million from investors at an estimated $1 billion valuation. For around $10 a month, individuals who use such apps can create or select an AI companion with whom they communicate through voice conversation or text messages. Many virtual companions adopt personas intended to simulate intimate human relationships—whether romantic or platonic—and remember past conversations with their human users. Tragically, The New York Times reported a suicide in connection with one such user in October—Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old Florida teen who fell in love with his virtual companion and took his life after withdrawing from friends and family. Of his relationship, Sewell wrote, “I like staying in my room so much because I start to detach from this ‘reality,’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany [his virtual companion] and much more in love with her, and just happier.”[13] With 20 million subscribers to Character.AI alone, one wonders if the programming “guardrails” they propose to avert such tragedies will address what lies at the heart of this societal angst.

My concern is less with the proliferation of this technology than the human beings or personalities calling it forth, selling it, and condoning it, which I take to share much in common with Victor. In other words, technology is developed in our society to meet the demand of consumers, whose collective personality or character is reflected in whatever is produced to satisfy their desires. To dream of the technological or virtual replacement of flesh-and-blood human beings, therefore, points to a fantasy that we might—if  we can just get the technology right—live in a world in which the painful features of human relationships have been eliminated. We seek to avoid the suffering associated with our flawed and limited nature—such as having to say goodbye to someone forever in death, the awkwardness of getting to know strangers, the vulnerability to rejection we fear from prospective lovers, and the arduous struggle of forgiving and seeking forgiveness. All of these, it is tacitly believed, might be obviated. Such dreams implicitly deny the reality of living in a world with creatures who we wish were made differently than they are.

But it is important to realize—and fictional accounts are helpful in reminding us of this—that escapism can have devastating effects in the real world. For such dreams overemphasize the unattractive features of reality while neglecting or taking for granted the goodness and beauty that coexist alongside them, even because of them. The will that seeks to transform human life in accordance with a dream ignores these redeeming or positive features of reality, providing justifications that, due to their abstraction from the fuller picture, often sound benevolent. Just as Victor justified his creation of the monster with ostensibly noble aims, those who would create or imitate human life with AI offer humanitarian purposes that likewise sound high-minded. Those who would question these efforts might for that reason be accused of lacking empathy regarding the relief that the producers of such technology seek to address—the loneliness from which millions in our society currently suffer, the profound grief of those who have lost loved ones, or the preservation of a relative’s memory among younger generations. Only the cold-hearted, it would seem, would deny such relief if it is available through the miracle of technology. 

The eager willingness to accept these justifications, however, points to a dreaminess about how the world might be transformed for the better if only more technological progress could be delivered to emancipate people from this flawed reality. More individual freedom, greater empowerment, as we are prone to believe, cannot possibly be bad. What is good or right is whatever removes limitations and human suffering. The benevolent purposes offered in support of such technology—already being used by tens of millions—speaks to these widely shared assumptions. But with Shelley and other science fiction writers, it might be worth questioning this romantic idealization of knowledge and power which so many of us seem to share with Victor. Here it is worth reflecting on the oversights attendant to his own dream. Consider that while there is undeniably a gain in empowerment represented by his discovery of life-creation in his laboratory, even before he pays the ultimate price for this in the monster’s path of destruction, Victor himself takes for granted the goodness and beauty in his life, particularly his relationship with family and friends. He bemoans the darkness of this world. Yet Shelley is careful to note that Victor ignores these intimate relationships for months on end in pursuit of his experiment, with which he is obsessed at the expense of all else.[14] Perhaps most conspicuously for an individual obsessed with life-creation, Victor’s neglect of his bride-to-be, Elizabeth, overlooks the more natural means of creating life, in which Victor seemingly has little interest. Elizabeth’s eventual murder, which marks the crescendo of the plot, is symbolically facilitated by Victor’s neglect of her well-being when he abandons her—alone in the bedroom, on the night of their marriage—inadvertently allowing the monster to attack her. Here, Shelley nods toward this most conspicuous, natural gift of life-creation in human relationship, which is blithely ignored and forsaken by Victor, who sees only a “dark world” that he wished to improve.

Similar questions are raised by modern science fiction regarding the ostensibly benevolent purposes of AI and life-creation, which becomes blind to the goodness and beauty of reality. In “Her,” Theodore is cut off from others and emotionally unavailable in his relationships, while finding it easy to connect with the AI, Samantha, who comprehends his entire past in seconds, bringing no history or baggage of her own. Real human relationships for him, by contrast, have involved misunderstanding and selfishness. Yet such virtues as magnanimity and patience, upon which a deeper human love is built, are rare and precious precisely for the difficulty of overcoming these all-too-human flaws that characterize real relationships. The depth of human virtue and the bonds of true relationship, in other words, paradoxically depend on the self-sacrifice of overcoming our selfish vices. Additionally, Theodore ultimately learns that our limited capacity for thought and speech is not merely a shortcoming, but actually adds value to human relationships, since the time spent with one person requires sacrificing being with others, making it more meaningful. Given the limitless nature of Samantha’s communication and thought, she is eventually discovered to be engaging in hundreds of similar conversations and relationships at once, thus diminishing the significance of the time spent with Theodore. The point is not simply that technology fails in this way, since one might arguably build such exclusivity or limits into AI companions. Rather, the point is that such aspirations harbor a belief in unqualified gain, so that a new form of “relationship” might be created that offers all of the good without the bad. Disappointed with human beings, Theodore evades the struggle that comes with human brokenness—whether that would have entailed mending a failed marriage or working on his emotional detachment to build a new, more permanent relationship. Both require hard and uncomfortable work. However, the miracle of technology is for the romantic a pretext for escape, obviating the need for such work on our flaws, which we all must do in any truly meaningful relationship. Theodore’s romantic view of reality, though aptly described as “wishful,” is in fact dark—for it is obstinately blind to the richness, goodness, and beauty of human life made possible by the very flaws and limits that are implied in being human.

The poignancy of Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode is its relatable wish of not having to endure the final separation of death. But there is, in fact, something valuable about the finitude of human life. For life’s preciousness, when it is conceived as a rare and cherished gift, is made possible precisely because of our limited time together. One wonders if having the opportunity to “talk to the dead” as Cody Delistraty attempts to do, we might not take for granted our actual time together while we are living. Delistraty asks the bot impersonating his mother about the nature of their relationship and seeks forgiveness for his self-perceived shortcomings, which he says he had failed to do while she was alive. Such conversations are often postponed precisely for their difficulty—is it not conceivable that the possibility of such virtual solace might help rationalize never having such hard conversations in the flesh? There is always more time, one might be tempted to think (and we already rationalize in this way), to have such difficult discussions. Still, this might be one of the more benign outcomes. Proposals to improve AI guardrails would seemingly have unique implications when it comes to voices representing actual persons with whom one once had a relationship, and the implications of an AI speaking with authority on that person’s behalf. The impact of such conversations—given the possibility of dismissive or even hurtful words toward survivors—would be difficult to censor or protect against without creating a false replica of the original person. It is worth reminding ourselves that not all the words we write or utter are worth repeating in an algorithm after we are gone. Perhaps we might simply excise virtual grandpa’s unsavory political views, or steer virtual mom away from her feelings toward your side of the family. But trying to imagine the ideal guardrails points to the dream that is driving these aspirations—one does not seek preservation of the real person, warts and all, but a sanitized, pleasant version that helps avoid the pain of loss.

What Should We Do?

Although I do not claim to know exactly where the ethical lines should be drawn regarding the responsible use of AI, I believe a conversation is needed that seeks to identify such boundaries, which invariably comes back to human desire and the question of its reasonable fulfillment or limitation. In that spirit, I would propose two principles that I believe might helpfully inform such a discussion. These insights are not my own, nor do they even belong to Shelley (though I think she gives brilliant imaginative life to them). Rather, they are principles we have inherited from the ancients—the central message of myths regarding human pride or hubris, embedded in stories such as Prometheus, the Fall, the Tower of Babel, etc. The first of these is that romanticism regarding freedom or the individual will gives license to boundless or unlimited desire, which humans have seen historically to be a destructive force. Not all knowledge and power is good for human beings, which would entail wildly optimistic assumptions regarding human nature. One must, therefore, begin with at least some fundamental assumptions regarding the possibility of good or evil in human beings, and an absolutist devotion to the freedom of the will implies a radical denial of our fallible or flawed nature. 

Such romantic idealism is rejected by these myths at their core, based on millennia of human experience regarding our selfishness, love of power, and pleasure derived from others’ esteem or admiration. Clearly, humans are not gods. However, as Aristotle says, they are also not beasts but find themselves in between these extremes of too much or too little confidence—capable at times of rising above ego and lust for the purpose of living well in society with others. For human beings, life always takes place in the “metaxy,” where both virtue and vice are conceivable and exist alongside one another. To achieve civilization or community, Aristotle says we must deliberate with one another on what it means to live ethically. My call for discussion on the ethical limits of the use of AI is in this spirit and simply assumes that some such limits exist, and that not all the problems associated with its use will be immediately apparent to the solitary individual. Quite simply, we need one another for insight regarding the perils, oversights, and sacrifices such uses of AI might entail that we may fail—whether obstinately or through simple oversight—to acknowledge on our own.

The second insight, which my brief sketch of Victor Frankenstein was intended to capture, is that we have a remarkable capacity for self-deception and rationalization. As with Victor, such rationales often serve as essential cover for our egos, desires, or selfish interests—what we really want to do but need to feel better about in our consciences. Self-delusion, as Victor shows, is a familiar obstacle to knowing the proper limits of our actions. In a commercial society, this is particularly challenging. For such justifications routinely come from those who are driven by the  profit motive, which can be made to sound at worst morally benign, or at best downright noble or high-minded. Is it not reasonable, then, to see such apps as potentially preying on the vulnerable—the lonely or grieving—who are all too eager to believe in the ethical soundness of these rationales? Would such persons not themselves echo these justifications in defense of their use, clinging to the promise that they never have to be alone again or suffer the sting of the death of a loved one? My point is that ethical discussion must be alert to this all-too-human tendency. 

Though these warnings are of ancient origin, Shelley’s imaginative rendering alerts us to their particular salience for the modern world, where technology holds out the allure of escape from a reality that is often painful, limiting, and onerous. To say that we “we are all Victor Frankenstein” in light of these novel uses of AI is to say that we increasingly view science and technology as Victor did—as a salve for ordinary (though often profound) pain and struggle, a means of escaping the latter and even attempting to create our own more pleasing versions of “reality.” For all its alleged optimism and wishful thinking, the romantic imagination is dark in its one-sidedness, refusing to see the goodness in the world which exists together with its opposite in permanent tension and even interdependence. Such darkness, as Shelley saw, is the hidden face of romantic idealism, which is blind to the indissoluble mixture (methexis) of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, that everywhere constitute our one reality.

NOTES:

[1] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2008), 40.

[2] Ibid., 54.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 51.

[6] Ibid., 52.

[7] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 130.

[8] Shelley, Frankenstein, 166.

[9] Ibid., 57.

[10] Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme:  A Meditation,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 324.

[11] Shelley, Frankenstein, 45-6.

[12] See Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Wilmington, DE:  Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005), 21-30 and Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” 324.

[13] Kevin Rose, “Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?” The New York Times, October 23, 2024.

[14] Shelley, Frankenstein, 50.

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