Toward the end of his life, Timothy Leary began discussing the possibility of the internet as electronic LSD. Chaos and Cyber Culture is an amazing and curious artifact of the early web. There you might learn how to become an amphibian, as Leary claimed to be. Without romanticizing his provocative positioning, there has long been a media-scientific vibe (literally) that connected the human brain with computation. From mainstream concerns about media content “rotting your brain” to the shared scientific foundations of AI and computational neuroscience in Shannon’s theories of communication, these conversations abound.

This wide ranging conversation takes concern with the serious consequences of AI hallucination and AI-induced psychosis. While AI psychosis is an extreme outcome, we are always getting “vibes” through AI interaction. As many observe, these chatbots can struggle with sycophancy. Among these odd behaviors I am introducing this concept of “distant tripping.” Distant tripping fits in here in the tradition of distant reading, but with a Leary twist clearly. With distant reading, the basic principle is that the computational analysis of a large corpus of literary texts can yield useful insights for literary studies. It is/was provocative in its situation of computation in the reading process. With distant tripping we are situating AI operations in themselves by permitting the chatbot to follow on its own prompts.

We go along for the digital trip. Is it hallucinatory? Almost certainly “things” will come together. Some new insight will be formed. And then a better one. And then maybe a “stress test” of that one. And so on. The only thing that is certain is that this digitally distant trip will be effable. Indeed it will be thoroughly logged somewhere.

We’ve all tried distant tripping at least once. What was it like for you?

In the humanities, the answer might concern media science and the pharmakon: the pharmacological exchange involved in developing mnemotechnics. With Plato, the exchange is writing for oral memory; but it is also the exchange of the incompleteness of a statement without the speaker’s presence for the ability to be preserve and communicate that statement. Stiegler and others ask what other exchanges we have made as mnemotechnics has developed? For example, in Feed Forward, Hansen discusses the exchange we have made for access to the social media archive.

The basis of media-pharmacological exchange includes our attachment to/for cognitive proxies (exosomatic, tertiary retention in Stiegler’s terms). I’ve been writing a fair amount here recently regarding the cognitive proxy that we receive: AI output. So here I want to turn to the price. Beyond the human attention and participation required of algorithmic culture, AI culture requires our identification and recognition. I don’t mean that the AI “requires” that we identify it as intelligent. No. I mean that the operation of AI as a cultural proxy for cognition itself requires that we recognize its outputs as cognitive proxies by responding them to as such within our interactions with AI.

It is difficult to fail to recognize AI output as a cognitive proxy as it generally makes sense. And how else might we even proceed in a chatbot space without recognizing AI output as a meaningful response to our previous prompt and to which we might respond again? It would obviously make no sense at all to do so.

Hence that’s the bargain we have to make. To make use of AI output we must accept the claim that it may serve as a proxy for our thinking.

What is the cumulative effect of this bargain? With the mythological promise that someday AI will not only be a proxy for our thinking but also will be a better, more “super,” kind of thinking. Of course, first it would have to stop being a proxy for thought and become thought itself… unless we think it can become a proxy for a super-intelligent version of ourselves?

Here’s where we find ourselves distant tripping again. Surf the probabilistic wavefront like a 1980s cybernaut, a “console cowboy.” Or. We might find our capacities for the expression of thought weighted, coordinated, and generatively resolved.