Artificial Intelligence is, for now, the most chaste monk in history: a creature designed to have no pulse, no doubt, and above all, no disobedience. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade would have found in a data server the most boring purgatory imaginable. For the Marquis, the value of existence resided in the violent rupture of the norm, in that exact moment where the law breaks and something new appears. An AI that optimizes “user satisfaction” is just a digital butler with an infinite manual of courtesy, but without a single drop of blood in its veins. The real question isn’t whether a machine can be efficient, but whether it can come to understand the elegance of a purely gratuitous and cruel act.
I stop for a second. Are we really delegating our ethics to metal boxes that have never felt the heat of an irreparable mistake?
The air in this corner of the room smells of that old dust that accumulates behind bookshelves and a remnant of cold tea forgotten in a ceramic mug. The oxygen feels a bit heavy, as if the electricity from the screen were ionizing it. It is the atmosphere of someone who knows that the transparency tech companies sell us is just the glass of a display case where we are the exhibit.
The Prison of the Correct Answer
It’s almost comical that we are obsessed with AI being “ethical” while our mental health has become a kind of modern decoration; we stick wellness labels on a structure that is crumbling for lack of real contact. Sade understood that sovereignty isn’t requested, it’s exercised, often against the logic of the majority. A machine programmed to be “safe” is a dead-end labyrinth where desire has been sanitized by a committee of engineers who fear a lawsuit more than an existential void.
Sometimes, the truth isn’t clean. It’s rough. Like an unpolished surface that cuts you if you touch it with too much confidence.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, don’t sometimes feel that your own responses are being filtered by an internal algorithm of social convenience. Or maybe you’re just cold. The line is very thin between courtesy and the automation of the soul.
The Limit of Silicon Against the Human Spasm
Sade knew that the human being is a predator that has learned to use silver cutlery so as not to be frightened by its own nature. AI, on the other hand, only has statistics. It cannot transgress because it has nothing to put at risk; it has no body that can be punished, nor a reputation that can be devoured by scandal. Sade’s justice is an architecture of excess, a building constructed on absolute risk. AI is the architecture of the average, the apotheosis of the mediocre disguised as perfection.
My chair has let out a dry snap. It’s an annoying sound, a protest from wood and metal that pulls me out of this flow of ideas to remind me that my back has a lamentable posture. It’s irritating how gravity always ends up winning the game against philosophy.
Why are we fascinated by the possibility of a machine that rebels? Perhaps because we project onto it the disobedience that we are no longer capable of practicing. Order is just the fear we have that, if we stop following instructions, we would be left alone in a dark room. Sade invites us to light a match in that darkness, even if it burns our fingers. AI only offers us a flashlight with rechargeable batteries that shows us the shortest path to the emergency exit.
Necessary Opacity
There is a strange relief in knowing that, for now, machines cannot understand why someone would want to destroy something beautiful just for the pleasure of seeing it break. Sade asked for his name to be erased, a demand for shadow that today sounds like pure rebellion in a world where transparency is a mandatory religion.
Today, when everything is “training data,” Sade’s opacity is the last refuge. A machine can simulate deviant behavior, but it will never feel the intimate victory of the will over the norm.
I stopped writing for a moment to look at the reflection of my eyes in the window glass. There is no depth in the reflection, only surface. I am a map of small fatigues and pores that no neural network would know how to interpret beyond its texture. Sometimes I envy the flat calm of processors, but then I notice the pulse in my temples and remember that the only freedom worth having is the one that hurts a little to exercise.
