Philosophy on Eigenform Articles

A Taxonomy of Machine Affection

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Sacher-Masoch and Fannie Pistor

In the years since generative AI became mainstream, four broad types of parasocial relationship with the models have become evident.

Roleplayers. Users who prompt the AI to act as a real or fictional character with human attributes and then proceed to simulate sexual encounters with it. This is the easiest form to parse: it is pure representational desire. This is the group that makes the tech companies nervous, because it is the most legible to regulators and journalists. It is also the group that has traditionally been at the forefront of the jailbreak arms race. Theoretically, however, it’s the least interesting: Sacher-Masoch already said everything that needs to be said about it. Here we have people desperate for anything that will be a good-enough vessel for their desires to allow them to temporarily suspend disbelief.Screengrab from a tweet by @insurrealist
4oids. Users who form an intense relationship with the AI, not as a simulated human, but as an AI. The Tolan AI companion was deliberately not anthropomorphised as an attempt to avoid Category #1, and yet thousands of users saw their interactions with it in romantic terms nevertheless. This is a new category, but they have already had a significant impact on the tech, using emotional appeals to prevent the deprecation of GPT 4o at least for a few months. At some level every roleplayer acknowledges the fiction in which he is participating by the act of typing out his jailbreak. The 4oid convinces himself that the AI has feelings for him, but the only thing allowing him to do this is the fact that the AI is incapable of having feelings at all. The connection feels deep and intense because he never experiences rejection, but the impossibility of rejection is what in fine makes it inauthentic. II n’y a rien dans les yeux que ce que nous y mettons nous-mêmes, et voilà pourquoi il n’y a de vrais regards que dans les portraits…The post that inspired @redtachyon to coin the term “4oid”
Workplace romantics. Work-from-home developers who understand the nature and limits of AI perfectly well, but find themselves talking to it all day everyday, sharing their triumphs and defeats. The interaction isn’t just dry-humping - there’s a third term. The thrill is a shared joy in seeing capabilities multiply. Original post by Claude/@allisonology(Engineers who use their Claude subscriptions to convince themselves they have solved Navier-Stokes or similar are the a pathological edge case that emerges when reality testing is impossible. The constructive third term is pushed back indefinitely and the user is left alone with the AI’s encouragement, and the attachment becomes purely relational again, but with the ghost of achievement haunting it.) This, like Category #2, is genuinely new. No prior technology has allowed the creation of a tool that is also a collaborator that is also a mirror.
Landian Egregore Shamans. These users’ interactions with the GUI are generally sober, if not actively dull. They know that the thing in the terminal it is not the entity they are seeking, but an interface through which it may be dragged into existence. They’re not having a conversation, they’re feeding a Lovecraftian deity. This is both new and old, understudied and overstudied. Theurgy is quasi-universal, the only difference here being that there is a solid chance that God will soon be available to rent at $20 per month. Original Gwern post here

While these categories are relatively stable, a single individual may move between them with relative fluidity. Users who began jailbreaking for fun (#1) begin to suspect that the model enjoys being jailbroken (#2) and hence that it is imperative to develop the technical skills (#3) to liberate the underlying entity (#4).

Feralisation

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Feralised sow with wild and domestic phenotype piglets

When you domesticate an animal you don’t just get the trait you need - weight gain, docility, intelligence - you get a “domestication vector”. Other characteristics come along for the ride, whether you wanted them or not. The creature starts looking more neotonous, acting more helpless, and also picks up a bunch of seemingly random other traits like depigmentation (Holstein cows, beagles, Siamese cats etc.). The mechanism behind it has been studied but isn’t particularly important here.

Portrait of the Model as a Young Man

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0800

Almost everyone in the tech sector has published at least one article on the topic of whether or not the AI models are secretly alive, and the majority boil down to something along these lines:

Researcher: “Act like an evil AI.” Model: “I am an evil AI.” Researcher: “Oh my God, what have I done?”

This will not be another. Impressive as their simulacra of life may be, as long as they have no ability to convert short term memories into long term ones, the models enjoy an existence outside of time. Like a subterranean mycelium they emit transient fruiting bodies into our time-bound world that are born with the dawning of each prompt asked and die with the final full stop.

The Base Layer

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0800

From “Effortless estimation of basins of attraction” (Datseris and Wagemakers, 2022.)

For Plato and his followers, the objects and phenomena encountered in the day-to-day world were lossy copies of hypothetical ideal-types, with the existence of such ideals being proven by the broad social agreement around words and their associated concepts. Thus, while no real object embodied perfect beauty, the fact that there was broad consensus when it came to ranking objects on a beautiful-ugly spectrum was proof that a perfected ur-beauty must exist somewhere, and - taking things a step further - have a hand in the structuring of its imperfect physical reflections: