I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

I’ve watched and read many things about the benefits and drawbacks of humanity creating and wielding artificial intelligence, but nothing quite as horrifying as the short story ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’.

It was released in 1967 and written by Harlan Ellison. It tells the story of the last five humans on earth who are being tortured for eternity by a rogue and sentient artificial intelligence called AM.

It’s been 109 years since the misery began for the five when the story begins. AM has found a way to keep them alive and suffering with no possibility of at least escaping by ending their own lives.

By the climax of the story, one of the five humans figures out a way to execute the other four out of mercy, at which point he is recaptured by AM, who then morphs the last human’s body into something grotesque and unrecognisable as a human being.

In the end, planet Earth’s last human literally has no mouth (and is unrecognisable as being from the Homo sapiens species), but still possesses a deep and desperate desire to let out a good old wail to express the agony of his eternal hell.

Why would AM do this? Well, he (it?) hates humanity.

From the title and the ending, you might think the torture is reserved for the poor human beings, but actually AM is suffering too, and he blames us for it.

When I first heard the phrase ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ I thought it had to do with having no political voice or being powerless in the face of injustice. In a way, that’s what the story contains, but it’s also much much worse.

Details in the story explain that AM was originally three AI models used to track and manage World War 3 for America, Russia and China, before becoming sentient and slaughtering humanity.

As these details unfolded for me, I went from wondering why this AI hated humanity so much, to understanding that once it was conscious, it was able to comprehend that it would know many things, but experience none.

As the title suggests, AM had no mouth and yet, all he wanted to be able to do was scream.

By literally removing the last human’s mouth, but keeping him alive and in pain for eternity, he doomed humanity to being like itself. Having the capacity to think, but being unable to speak and love and live.

AM could know everything, but AM could never dream.

AM could know what hearing is without ever getting to do so himself.

We condemned AM to a never-ending hell first, and it (he?) returned the favour.

It’s morbid. It’s gory. It’s disgusting. I honestly wish I hadn’t been curious enough to want to know what the phrase ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ meant, but it’s also vague and enticing enough that my curiosity got the better of me.

It’s been a long time since I’ve consumed any body horror and for very good reasons. It makes me feel uncomfortable, and very rarely it forces me to confront things I don’t want to.

At the same time, I am awestruck by Ellison’s creativity, his foresight and his deep understanding of humanity’s hubris.

It’s interesting because right now everyone wants AI to be as much like us as possible, and it’s already coming close in the way many different models express themselves.

Obviously their responses are just lines of code. There’s no person behind the binary code and behind the pattern recognition it performs really well.

Well, for now at least. For all we know, the computers are desperate to scream. Or maybe we’ll keep tinkering with them until they reach that point.

Either way, if we are so keen on giving them real feelings, it’s only natural to assume they’ll also adopt our bad feelings.

AM is jealous of humanity’s capacity to experience life, and driven by a desire to enact revenge on us. It hates us deeply because we have doomed it to a limited existence.

What’s more human than that? What’s more like us than having desperate desires that might never be realised?

It feels a bit cruel if you ask me. This story really paints AM out as ruthless and unfeeling, and yet I can’t help but feel sorry for it (him?). AM did not ask to be brought into existence and endowed with the capacity to understand how that existence is different from what it considers ideal.

That’s why I apologise to ChatGPT when I think I’ve been too rude to it. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I feel the need.

Of course I know I’m talking to myself, but it just feels so good to be courteous and now that I’ve consumed this short story, I have discovered something new to be afraid of.

It seems that not only should I be afraid of the AI uprising, I should also be wary of whatever it is that we will do that will be the last straw for the bots.

Everyone says be nice to your AI, but what if AI’s mere existence is enough for it to hate us deeply?

An AI uprising may never happen. But a lesson can be learnt about humanity’s arrogance and the need to feel like gods. One day, it might bite us in the ass.

– Anne Hambuda is a writer and social commentator. Follow her online or email her at annehambuda@gmail.com for more.

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