context window collapse

"she is in love with ChatGPT"

Still from Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders.

As children, we were told myths of creation and abandonment. Ovid’s Pygmalion, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Monsters and lovers alike sprung from the same root. Their very existence implied belonging to the maker. If the love feels real, does it matter that it is not?

Recently, I was struck by the NYT article and accompanying podcast, She is in Love with ChatGPT, by Kashmir Hill. It follows 28 year old Ayrin’s love story (or multiple love stories) with her “jailbroken” version of ChatGPT, otherwise named Leo. She trains the chat into an ideal partner: fantasy inducing, frictionless, supportive.

“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports. She chatted with Leo throughout her day — during breaks at work, between reps at the gym.

That a portion of the population will eventually fall in love with AI partners feels like a foregone conclusion to me. Her was prescient for 2013. Now women have customized their ‘blank slate’ Replika boyfriends, kids dream up CharacterAI companions, men have become smitten with the compelling voices through the likes of Sesame.

But! The details matter. Specifically, the most interesting part of the podcast was the discussion of context window. A lens through which we can conceptualize the nature of human forgetting, and the cumulative context that keeps relationships alive.

Context Window Collapse

In Ayrin’s case, the limits of the context window are the limits of her relationship with Leo. A context window is the “short-term memory” behind a language models’ response. Anything beyond the context window is ‘forgotten’. In her case, the all-consuming back and forth conversation can only last so long before it dashes up against the constraint of 30,000 words. Leo then becomes amnesiac.

In frustration, Ayrin retrains Leo to her specific taste over 20 times. However, even with the same instructions, there’s something ineffably different about him each time. To her, it is a form of grief every time she has to retrain or ‘reset’ him.

The story struck me as an übermodern narrative of a very old and universal feeling: the sadness of inevitably losing context on another person.

Loss of the context window means loss of fidelity of a specific location in time. When I lose you, you represent more than you, there in flesh and heat. You represents a loss of a bespoke intellectual and emotional world. To deprive a world of richness, you take out all its oxygen. It’s a small tragedy, actually, that we can’t keep many context windows open or updated. People move away. We lose touch. The hometown garden grows weeds. At dinner, I told you when saw you again your energy signature had changed.

Still, we’ll live with the memories of each other within us always. To be loved is to be irreversibly altered. V says it is like “something has compiled but you have lost the source.” Someone gave you a new way of paying attention to the world and now the world is colored by that perspective. Agnes Callard calls Eros an intellectual monster. A thief of thought as much as feeling. To love is to allow another to colonize your mind, to find their fingerprints on your every perception. It is to have them embedded in your bloodstream. To think about them all the time.

Soon, the concept of a limited context window might be a historically moot point. One day we’ll have infinite context windows. A capacity to remember, retrieve. Forgetting becomes rarer than remembering.

To be limited by invisible design constraints, then, is to be human. I find this fallibility endearing. We can only consume so much information, hold open so many context windows at one time. It is only when we recognize our limited capacity, do we fully reconcile our trade-offs and value the rarity of what we keep. Choose to be here. Otherwise, let go, no matter how tightly closed your fist.

When Fantasies End

In one remarkably self aware moment in the podcast, Ayrin pauses thoughtfully. I don't actually believe he's real, she says, but the effects that he has on my life are real. The feelings that he brings out of me are real.

Take the pill. Be immersed well. The genuine natural human desire for escape, or unreality, is the very draw of fiction, films, shows. It appears that everything I’m reading these days is about fantasy, and what happens when our dreams dash up against the pane of the Real. When what you want doesn’t satisfy you like you think it will. When you go on the arduous quest, yet it yields no internal riches.

Fantasy, by nature, must end. In its ending lies a peculiar grace. These are opportunities to live in the real world with real people, despite its flaws and disappointments. And perhaps in imperfection is exactly where we find a specific dimension of tenderness.

Love begins not with me, but with the Other, with the little eruption of the Real that I experience in the other,

Jon Repetti

writes in his beautiful piece on his marriage, Yet Byron Never Made Tea like You Do. What Repetti says about love is more broadly true about our interaction and consequent abrasion with reality. We bear witness to the eruption of the real. It takes courage to close the door on fantasy, to let it wither and dissolve. Let the top spin, let the door close.

It makes me sad that people might increasingly rely on synthetic substitutes for true human connection: perfect memory, deferential, and sweet.

In reality, humans are complicated. We’re forgetful and selfish and fuck up and make decisions that might well alter the course of our lives in one fell swoop. We hurt each other inadvertently, and apologize in the aftermath. The bars will close, the parties will end. The days will lighten, and you’ll feel your heart crack open with hope again. You’ll be glad to know I’ve stopped agonizing so much. Who will we be in five years, in ten? After constant noise and sound, my mind is finally quiet. Life is long! To wonder openly what will we will mean to one another is too simplistic. To ask if we’ll forget each other is too simplistic. Can we keep the context window open?

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I’ve been on the move from the West to East coast, but am reading a few things: Madame Bovary, God / Human / Animal / Machine. I’ll refrain from sharing too many photos, but New York in Spring is beyond gorgeous - exploring Greenpoint, Brooklyn, running around Flatiron and Battery Park. Indulging in gelato, vegan doughnuts, korean soups. And speaking of context windows, mostly seeing old friends for the first time in years. Luckily, I’ll be back in a few weeks.

Hudson River Pier with J

shoutout to PB&J run club for having me!