What fairytales can tell us about AI

AI may be a new technology, but our relationship with it has antecedents in some of our oldest stories. Magical helpers, wish-granting genies and world-devouring monsters are figures of the collective unconscious that appear in myths and fairytales all over the world, from the earliest time in human history.

And these figures are still alive today. Although they they have been reduced to stereotypes in mass entertainment, their power as archetypes remains.

This is already one of the main differences between fairytales and modern stories. In fairytales, the characters are not individuals. They don’t have names or personalities as such because they are archetypes: the king, the maiden, the hero, the witch. An archetype encompasses the symbolic, which makes it more than a social role. For example, a king represents authority and sovereignty but can take on any number of other characteristics, such as being weak or strong, vain or wise, etc. By contrast, a stereotype is a superficial and fixed generalisation. (Think of any Disney hero or leading lady.) Where stereotypes are brittle and opaque, archetypes are flexible and transparent, opening a portal to understanding.

And that is the first argument for the relevance of fairytales to AI. Fairytales are not just stories, they are the heuristics of human life. Fairytales encode timeless frameworks for making order out of the chaos and complexity of raw experience. As such, they provide invaluable support for decision-making, particularly under conditions of ambiguity and/or time pressure.

Second, the driver of action in fairytales is not just any kind of conflict, but rather primal human needs and deep social conflict. The desperation arising from starvation levels of hunger forms the backdrop of numerous fairytales, such as Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood. Similarly, the loss of belonging by losing one’s place in the family, such as in the classic stories of wicked stepmothers, constitutes a kind of social death as well as the possibility of physical death. The stakes in fairytales are aligned to what matters most to human beings, which also tend to be the things we are least rational about.

Third, fairytales are unconcerned with character development (see point 1 about archetypes), placing the focus instead on the encounter with otherness. Because we have largely lost the experience of encountering non-human beings in the industrialised world, we perceive the talking animals, the faeries and the enchanted forests of fairytales as whimsical fictions. They are anything but. They represent the reality of other minds and other kinds of agency, as well as the capacity to be in communion with these other intelligences. That, indeed, may be one of the most valuable tools that fairytales can offer us in negotiating our evolving relationship with AI.

As a starting point, this lens of agentic otherness can make visible the unconscious hopes, dreams and fears we have projected onto AI, especially when those projections take on the highly charged forms of saviour or satan. To the extent that those projections remain unconscious, we will not be able to think rationally about AI, and our approaches to managing AI will be either impulsive or compulsive. Bringing our own shadow figures to light can help us build controls and governance that is robust, adaptive and considered.

And there are even greater possibilities for applying symbol and archetype to AI. Using myth and fairytales as inference frameworks, we might even be able to find new perspectives on seemingly intractable issues like the alignment problem. After all, numerous fairytales involve a quest to restore full humanity to someone who has been transformed into a different creature — usually by lifting a curse, which is like a recursive function loop — or to reconcile the human and non-human realms through some higher principle of unification, as in the many stories of human and non-human marriages.

This knowledge is already there for us, waiting to be unlocked by the key of symbol: how to negotiate the terms of the deal by which the help of magical beings is procured, for example, or how to approach the treasure stores guarded by dragons. Fairytales can show us the desires and fears that we keep hidden from ourselves, which led us into the dark wood in the first place.