Surrogate conscience… A term I never heard of before, but love!
This is how I feel about having God in my life. Having Him as my surrogate conscience knowing I always need to depend on Him and His guidance.; not let my interests solely guide me.
I think storytellers in all media also need to play a role in clearly stating when good or bad behaviors represented by characters are good and/or bad. Otherwise they identify with a character first (like the creature identifying with Satan) based on who they relate with or find “cool” and then automatically ascribe their behaviors as cool.
The manosphere being shocked to learn Homelander is the villain in The Boys comes to mind, from an audience perspective. Or, from the perspective of the storyteller, another example is the Zack Snyder movies missing the point of Superman or the Watchmen, and abandoning the central ethos in favor of aura farming masculine tropes.
Unfortunately, in a world of algorithms and siloed media consumption, the baseline of media literacy we once assumed isn’t there anymore. And as you rightly point out, not all children have an adult in their lives contextualizing the stories they consume.
But I think the need for that contextualizing goes beyond childhood. Many of the bad actors in the world may have had good parents and good childhoods but they lost their compass when they entered the wilderness of adulthood.
"I think storytellers in all media also need to play a role in clearly stating when good or bad behaviors represented by characters are good and/or bad."
I quibble a little bit if "clearly state" means some kind of authorial intrusion that turns the art into a didactic piece. Rather I think they need to *clearly show* when behaviors are good and bad. What we need is a moral realism that shows evil as evil and clearly shows its consequences on the soul of those who choose evil and those who are caught up in their choices and harmed by them.
This beautiful eloquent article could equally be applied to the “child” we humans have created … A.I … we have created it and now leave it alone to develop and make sense of our world … Will we , just like Victor , live to regret this ?
I reread Frankenstein several years ago and was struck by the sheer horror of it. I literally stopped reading it at one point because it was too frightening to ponder—then finished it several weeks later. This fine piece explains perhaps what I did not understand. It may well be my fear for the life my 5 grandchildren face. The future has forever carried a foreboding.
Thought provoking - but ultimately you do have to choose an alignment direction for any LLM as it's baked into its reward system. So none of them really wake up without their 'moral sense'. Plenty to debate on what that moral sense should be.
It’s alive! But is it human?
Excellent work, thank you.
Thank you!
Thank you for this thought-provoking take on Frankenstein as a failure of parenting and not just an example of hubris.
Surrogate conscience… A term I never heard of before, but love!
This is how I feel about having God in my life. Having Him as my surrogate conscience knowing I always need to depend on Him and His guidance.; not let my interests solely guide me.
Absolutely brilliant.
I think storytellers in all media also need to play a role in clearly stating when good or bad behaviors represented by characters are good and/or bad. Otherwise they identify with a character first (like the creature identifying with Satan) based on who they relate with or find “cool” and then automatically ascribe their behaviors as cool.
The manosphere being shocked to learn Homelander is the villain in The Boys comes to mind, from an audience perspective. Or, from the perspective of the storyteller, another example is the Zack Snyder movies missing the point of Superman or the Watchmen, and abandoning the central ethos in favor of aura farming masculine tropes.
Unfortunately, in a world of algorithms and siloed media consumption, the baseline of media literacy we once assumed isn’t there anymore. And as you rightly point out, not all children have an adult in their lives contextualizing the stories they consume.
But I think the need for that contextualizing goes beyond childhood. Many of the bad actors in the world may have had good parents and good childhoods but they lost their compass when they entered the wilderness of adulthood.
"I think storytellers in all media also need to play a role in clearly stating when good or bad behaviors represented by characters are good and/or bad."
I quibble a little bit if "clearly state" means some kind of authorial intrusion that turns the art into a didactic piece. Rather I think they need to *clearly show* when behaviors are good and bad. What we need is a moral realism that shows evil as evil and clearly shows its consequences on the soul of those who choose evil and those who are caught up in their choices and harmed by them.
Thank you for that refinement. I agree— that is what I intended to say.
This beautiful eloquent article could equally be applied to the “child” we humans have created … A.I … we have created it and now leave it alone to develop and make sense of our world … Will we , just like Victor , live to regret this ?
This was such a great read. Especially after seeing The Bride!
Guidance is needed in parenting... omnipresence is not.
Excellent article! Thank you for sharing.
This was so well done!
I reread Frankenstein several years ago and was struck by the sheer horror of it. I literally stopped reading it at one point because it was too frightening to ponder—then finished it several weeks later. This fine piece explains perhaps what I did not understand. It may well be my fear for the life my 5 grandchildren face. The future has forever carried a foreboding.
Thought provoking - but ultimately you do have to choose an alignment direction for any LLM as it's baked into its reward system. So none of them really wake up without their 'moral sense'. Plenty to debate on what that moral sense should be.