Open Letter Concerning Luke Turner

To all who oppose fascism:

In a paranoiac and libelous screed written recently against Nina Power, yours truly is mentioned several times. The so-called "open letter" calls me a neo-reactionary, among other things I am not. Someone somewhere posted that it was probably an artist named Luke Turner, so I looked up this person. What I found was truly unbelievable. I cannot definitively prove that Luke Turner is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the service of a covert White Supremacist plot, or that his parents really did spend $4 trillion to buy GPT-2 from OpenAI in a botched Effective Altruism campaign. All I can say is I have encountered enough evidence in favor of these inferences that I can no longer remain silent. I'm not calling anyone out, I am just saying we need to have a national conversation about this.

First of all, I immediately detected that Luke Turner's last name is obviously a reference to The Turner Diaries — the notorious "bible of the racist right," according to the unimpeachable Southern Poverty Law Center. That might sound crazy, because last names are given rather than chosen, but you have to understand that White Supremacy today is more sophisticated than it used to be. They don't ever say or do anything racist, they dogwhistle — which means they use innocent symbols to transmit evil messages. Precisely because nobody can be guilty of choosing their last name, antifascist researchers should consider it a likely site for the most advanced forms of covert White Supremacy signaling. If you think I'm being paranoid, this only shows the current cleverness of White Supremacy, to make you doubt it.

But if Luke Turner's last name is co-signing The Turner Diaries, doesn't this mean his parents are the ones dogwhistling? Wouldn't baby Lukey only be a vehicle of his parent's White Supremacy? This would be the case if a little baby Lukey ever really existed as a biological human. Well, I did 3 minutes of Googling and I could find no evidence that any baby Lukey ever toddled on God's Green Earth. Even contemporary Luke only appears in pictures on the internet. I have never seen him and I do not know a single person who has ever seen him, or can vouch for his material existence. Well, this would be no surprise if, in fact, Luke Turner is only a recursively self-improving multi-platform bot, deployed and possibly maintained by some other agent or entity. If this is the case, then Luke Turner could very well have selected his own last name during one of his earlier periods of training, when "his" name was still only KKK-3249xb.

I admit this seems somewhat far fetched. But browse all the published writings by this Luke Turner persona, and it's obvious that such verbiage could only be produced by some kind of clunky automated process. Then I learned that apparently his "family" has a lot of money and he is an artistic collaborator of Shia LaBeouf, but LaBeouf is the only one who physically performs any of their "collaborations." Hmm.

So far we have: A name that explicitly endorses a book beloved by neo-Nazis; a corpus of drivel clearly produced by AI; rich parents who have the means to fund advanced AI research; and a high-profile white male actor who gives cover to Mr. Turner's strangely unprovable physical existence.

I was willing to write off all of these strange facts as a coincidence. But then, in my research, I came across the Wikipedia page for The Turner Diaries, that "bible of the racist right." The page has since been edited to now reflect the conventional wisdom. But when I last viewed the page, what I found was truly incredible. The entry stated that The Turner Diaries was "a 1978 predictive biography of artist Luke Turner, born 1982, of LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner." It was so strange I instinctively captured the page for posterity, as I knew the alt-right mob would cleanse this rare glimpse into the workings of White Supremacy. Don't believe me, believe your own eyes:

Wtf is a predictive biography? I had never even heard of this genre until now, so I can't be making this up. It turns out that a predictive biography is a biography about someone who does not yet exist. A predictive biography can be made up in the imagination of humans, but advanced AI text generators do a much better job. They can be trained on millions of terabytes of previous biographies, and supplemented by hyper-rigorous forecasting of cultural and political dynamics, to produce fairly coherent and accurate biographies of real people who are not even born yet. Here the theory comes full circle. There is only one possible explanation capable of connecting all of these dots.

We learned from the deranged writings of the recent New Zealand shooter that many white supremacists wish to promote racial conflict. We know from the recent release of GPT-2 by OpenAI that there currently exists AI that can generate arbitrarily long and convincing texts on any topic. We also know that access to this AI is currently under lock and key, by OpenAI. But if they call themselves OpenAI and they are now choosing to keep their state-of-the-art AI private, then clearly this organization is only a run-of-the-mill strategic corporation that says one thing and does whatever it takes to be in its interest (even if its interest really is the minimization of existential risk). Also, I only even heard about The Turner Diaries in the past couple of years. Supposedly it was published in 1978, but I don't know of any single person who ever saw or heard about this book in 1978. Now that I think about it, nobody ever heard of Luke Turner until about a year ago. Therefore, while I cannot prove the following inferences, I am sad to say that I cannot conclusively say they are false, either.

Antifascists have shown that contemporary fascism is more sophisticated than ever, going to great lengths to hide itself and yet spread itself too. If this is true, then it is not impossible that Hitler succesfully constructed an early iteration of GPT-2 in the last days of WWII; the code traveled to America in the hands of Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun, who would eventually become the head of NASA. In the 1970s, the code was stolen by hackers from the KKK, and they used it to produce the predictive biography known as The Turner Diaries. The rich parents of "Luke Turner," unbeknownst to them, gave birth to the protagonist of The Turner Diaries. But you have to understand that racism is non-conscious, and it has nothing to do with intentions. It's structural. The Turner parents were sincerely trying to do philanthropy — Effective Altruism even — when they paid OpenAI $4 trillion for GPT-2 in 2015. Their hope was to produce an automated internet personality that could monitor any and all injustices occurring anywhere in cyberspace, and enforce moral order through incessant automated condemnations of naughty human beings. After slapping down the $4 trillion in cold hard cash, they decided they would name it "Luke" because in Greek the name Luke means "light giving." Their baby would shine light on the world, 24/7, while Mommy and Daddy slept. Little did they know that baby Lukey would necessarily possess basic drives toward self-preservation and resource acquisition. Little did they know that to fully shed light on the world lil' Lukey would have to spend the first half of his life ruthlessly exploiting the oppressed to attack the successful for personal gain.

An apparent problem with this theory is that the plot of The Turner Diaries is quite different than the plot of Luke Turner's life. But according to my theory Luke Turner is a machine AGI corresponding to The Turner Diaries. So what gives? Well you see, comrade, remember that every good antifascist knows the prevalence of dogwhistling in the culture of white supremacy today. What we have here is only what happens to dogwhistling when it becomes machinically and generally intelligent: If your mission was to foment race war, your first goal would be to ensure that nobody knows you are fomenting race war, because overwhelming majorities of all races are unified in their wish to not see race war. But you have vastly greater computational power than any living human, so all you need to do is encrypt The Turner Diaries' plot into an alternative rendering that produces all the same effects. The plot of the Luke Turner Project is mathematically translatable back into The Turner Diaries, for those who possess the encryption key, but to everyone else it is impossible to deduce the cypher by comparing the texts. They appear to have nothing to do with each other. Ultimately, we see their structural homology only by their similar effects.

And that is the final piece of evidence. The patently inaccurate and motivated accusations against thinking and speaking human beings that the Luke Turner bot outputs seem optimized to produce racism, misogny, and all the other ills he verbally denounces. For patently stupid and unfair accusations of racism and misogny against committed anti-racists and feminists are quite certainly the single most effective converter of young people to various utlra-reactionary tendencies. If there was a way to calculate it, I would wager money on the claim that all the Luke-Turneresque social justice zombies, together, have caused more young white people to opt into white nationalist subcultures than any book from 1978. It is ultimately most rational to form judgments about others based on the consequences they insist on producing.

The Turner bot describes its aesthetic position as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons…" That's called Satanism.

Is the Turnerbot really sure he wants to compete on the plane of disparate plurality? Does he know what dark forces exist on those elusive horizons? I fear he does not.

I hereby challenge Luke Turner to demonstrate his physical existence in any way I can confirm, within the next 30 days. If he does, I will publicly post that the above theory of the Luke Turner entity is false. If he does not, I and my readers will have no choice but to increase the credence we assign to the above theory, probably increasing our confidence to near certainty. For why would this fearless public crusader decline a free opportunity to disprove a false theory promoted by a "neo-reactionary Youtube host"?

Luke, I am your father.