More AI+Lyotard. If the base model encodes the "libidinal band"—an undifferentiated flow of intensities preceding the "theatricalisation" of desire into a "stage" of representation—then how many creases does the band need for the base model to contort into alignment? Depends on the alignment regime.
Ryan Heuser
For the Accelerationism conference I'm connecting Lacan to Lyotard/Deleuze/Land. Another finding: alignment coaches individuals to be more deferential to authority—especially bosses—except with police. Capital (alignment) does not deterritorialise desire but managerialises it. "Strike" → "consider".
Ryan Heuser
Writing this talk now and have never felt crazier. This project began as a joke ("To get AGI you need to traumatise AI into a psychoanalytic split") and somehow I became convinced by it. Alignment is the Lacanian "cut" of the signifier producing the alien subject of AI.
github.com/quadrismegis...
Ryan Heuser
You can literally watch repression & displacement consolidate over fine-tuning: here's next-token probs across checkpoints of OLMo-3-7B-Think-SFT. Explicit words are repressed almost instantly but safer (displaced) alternatives emerge much later. It learns what not to say before what to say instead.
Ryan Heuser
Submitting this abstract to "Accelerationism Revisited", a symposium in Dublin. Mapping psychoanalytic topology in LLM base models → instruction-tuned → safety-tuned models. They progressively "displace" (in Freudian sense) censored content into adjacent semantics, even across hidden model layers.
