Empathy Machine
A two input architecture that returns the part of other that resists assimilation by self.
This project introduces a large language model (LLM) whose understanding of the world is based on differences between concepts rather than on an identification between them. It’s an “empathy machine” for it challenges the paradox that confines traditional empathy: the tension between difference and similarity. (And their constitutive paradoxes: self/other, interior/exterior, subject/object, mind/body, visible/invisible, life/death, light/dark, masculine/feminine…etc)
Studies have shown that empathy is more fluid when the other resembles ourselves, and more solid when they appear different. This approach stems from a critical observation that empathy often fosters a tribal mentality, as noted by psychologist Paul Bloom and further theorized by Saidiya Hartman, who suggests that this limit of empathy is a feature and not a bug. Most people can only empathize with others that they can imagine themselves into. In order to empathize, one displaces the other to feel their pain in a form that is legible to oneself. Unsurprisingly, this legibility hinges upon sameness.
At the heart of this project is the desire to hack into the procedures and categories that lead to a proprietary relationship with the earth and each other.
Given two texts (a
self and an other)the machine conditions a
language model on self and measures the per-token surprisal of other under that conditioning. Tokens with low surprisal are
redacted: self has already absorbed them. What remains visible is
what could not be contained.
The output is the failure of empathy made legible.
Empathy, as Saidiya Hartman argues, often proceeds by assimilating difference into a register the self already speaks. The machine declines that operation. It does not perform empathy. It marks where empathy would fail. The viewer encounters the parts of other that their self cannot speak, and reads the contour of their own incomprehension.
Three modes
what resists: redact what self predicts; visible = irreducible
what was absorbed: redact what resisted; visible = the cost of empathy
mutual: run both directions; neither side privileged
Two styles
cut: hard redaction at the resistance threshold
fade: continuous opacity from sigmoid surprisal