Making sure human society remains human, not robotic.
Style Inference Labs, Inc was started to counter the dangerous alliance of two historical developments: the increasing success of robots to navigate and act upon the world and the increasing failure of the humanities to help people do the same. University programs like philosophy, history, literature, and the arts have failed to empower young people and the public at large to face unexplainable mental health crises and unstoppable humanitarian disasters. Though these programs alone are tasked to study what is uniquely human, they are neglected, ironically when AI has proved that calculation and thinking, though very useful, are not uniquely human abilities. At Style Inference Labs, we are re-organizing the knowledge produced in the humanities to promote what we think is uniquely human: our capacity to desire rather than decide… our ability to love and work on something without much thought. The age of artificial intelligence requires us to turn our attention to what is not intelligence and yet what is essential to thrive as a human being and as a society. Style inference is a tool for people to remember and develop their uniquely human ability to desire spontaneously, to feel naturally motivated in a human activity, to act effortlessly in the world without over-relying on a robotic consciousness and vision of society which may guarantee an efficient world but cannot enjoy or live in it.
“Where does this initiative come from?”
Before AI, there was no shortage of intelligence. The last century began with two revolutions: Einstein’s, who propelled us into the scientific and technological world we recognize, and Freud’s, who discovered a deeper psychological world in human beings.
Unfortunately, Freud’s successors after World War II, leading to today’s psychotherapists, moved away from the deeper and unconscious desires the Austrian doctor originally identified. They pathologized his idea of Narcissism, which originally was a universal and productive ingredient for human desire, not a negative diagnosis. Narcissism for Freud was what anchored a person’s desire in personal history, tying what we want with experiences we have actually lived. As theoretical constructs, Narcissism and the Unconscious help us locate which of our desires are genuinely our own, emerging from our individual past. Without them, we would confuse desire with its opposite: a strategic intelligence, when we want something not because it fits with our past but because it promises us a future.
In Civilization and its Discontent, Freud explained how progress and its useful instruments like technology weaken our emotions. The calculated mindset and intelligence we are increasingly reliant on prevent us from accessing desires natural and organic to our sense of self and personal history. What remains is the science of decision, calculation, and strategic thinking, the merits of which the successors of Einstein, unlike those of Freud, succeeded to promote to the public at large. This divergence in the fate of two geniuses is partially the reason we are now troubled by machines actively interpreting our behaviour, including LLMs used as mental health assistants. The danger: robots will now teach us how to calculate our chances for happiness but we will forget how to instinctively feel happy.
“If style inference comes from Freud… was he not problematic toward women?”
Freud articulated mechanisms we believe to be essential to style inference and to a humanly unique way of living in the world. But our research shows that these mechanisms would not have been passed down to us without the help of Lou Andreas-Salomé, artist, critic, and the first female psychoanalyst who authored The Dual Orientation of Narcissism.
The basic premises behind style inference - our inability to sever ourselves from our environment, the importance of balancing heart and mind and distinguishing between a socially-imposed desire and one genuinely springing from the subject - come from the work of women thinkers invested in shaping a better world, including Mary Shelley, George Elliot, May Ziadeh, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Susan Sontag, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. The first person we believe clearly articulated the danger of a robotic mindset in a calculated world was George Sand, prolific author of more than 70 novels that imagined a world where intelligence is wrongly king.
“May logic and not love perish first then… Seek what I mean and which I cannot articulate in terms you won’t resist. I don’t wish to debate - everything you say is certain. But what is certain is not enough for me. People don’t love what is certain. I would rather what is true, what we love without completely grasping.”
George Sand (1804-1876)
“What’s style inference?”
In Instinct and its Vicissitudes, Freud elaborated on two mechanisms through which we desire without effort: projection and introjection. Both are united by a tragic past a person experienced but forgot: what we desire in the present is something we lost in the past. We project without effort needed desirable qualities upon something (or someone) only when, once upon a time, we couldn’t keep these qualities for ourselves. Likewise, we introject (embody) desirable qualities only when we couldn’t keep them outside our reach.
For example, consider Person A, who doesn’t feel motivated to study for long hours, nor to work out regularly. Person B, on the other hand, seems to do both effortlessly. According to Freud, Person A’s problem is that they are not projecting nor introjecting: they want to study or hit the gym, sure, but only as a means to an end, an intelligent calculation of future value. This may not be the case for Person B, who enjoys the same activity for its own sake, possibly because it stands for a piece of their individual past. In the case of introjection, Person B might have had a high school teacher they admired from a distance, only to one day lose that admiration by filling their shoes and embodying their approach. In the case of projection, Person B might have been used to spending evenings drawing, not working out, until their new urban life got in the way and made them lose their love for a calm environment.
To build motivation or new desires one must then be ready to lose them. By turning our attention to our unconscious desires, what we project upon and introject instinctively without much thought, we can enjoy them and develop them until their natural appeal runs its course. Lou Andreas-Salomé emphasized this point well before Freud: we should not be afraid to chase our own desires, even if we are running toward their end. Disillusionment was productive for the prolific author of various works on literature, philosophy, religion, and psychology: only by questioning what we unquestionably love do we develop a wider compass of interests and passions able to take us further and further into an empowering life.
“What services are you offering?”
At Style Inference Labs, we understand that the type of work we are doing goes against the current. Why stop and reflect upon the past when the future seems so tempting? We understand we will not be able to convince everyone, let alone in the near future, about the need for style inference, psychoanalysis, or new ways to conceive desire, motivation, or the human.
But we believe our work, while appearing new on the surface, has its predecessors and is only a new name for an old way of thinking against thinking, of loving against intelligence. Our success stories are poets, prophets, philosophers who, even in the darkest phases of history, idealized the real. These underground voices found their pragmatic happiness when many others, louder and more convincing than them, did the opposite, striving to realize the ideal on earth at devastating costs to human societies.
We therefore believe our services must match reality: like all those who came before us, we are still looking for our peers who can read the writing on the wall and who recognize that all the solutions proposed to solve human discontent have not worked. If you are looking to motivate your team without deceiving them, if you are striving to design an LLM that does not misunderstand what people want, we’re happy to collaborate. We offer workshops designed as introductions to style inference to the general public and we develop safer algorithms that account for the deeper and truer way human beings desire and navigate in the world.
Ready for the paradigm shift?
Fill the form below or get in touch with us via contact [at] styleinferencelabs.com