Chants of Sennaar: How AI Can Fracture A Society

Image; Rundisc

The 2023 game Chants of Sennaar is, first and foremost, about language. You play an unnamed traveler moving up a Tower of Babel-esque structure. Each level is host to a different society with a different language, and it's on you as an outsider to decipher the many words and phrases you encounter.

Described in its marketing as "the Dark Souls of language games," Chants of Sennaar expects you to learn its many languages by observation. While there are words littered about everywhere, it's through actions and context that you learn the ones you need to advance the story. The game forces you to piece these words together, writing down your best approximations in its internal notebook until finally, like learning any language, the rules click into place, and you understand them.

Like the Tower of Babel story itself, the people of this world are divided, and this is reflected in their language. For example, the religious society you start in refers to themselves as "Devotees," and the militaristic society above them as "Warriors." Those Warriors call the Devotees below them the "Impure" and the society above them the "Chosen." Those Chosen, an artistic society, call themselves "Bards" and the warriors below "Idiots." These words are not simply one-to-one swaps but indicate these societies' differing values: ones that mock and revere the people above and below them.

As you progress, you learn the source of that disconnection: an AI that has taken over everything.

The fictional ways AI can oppress humanity

There are many doomsday examples of what happens when actual artificial intelligence emerges (something that might never happen). The most common is the apocalypse. We see through examples such as the film Terminator (1984) of an artificial intelligence managing to destroy most of humanity, usually through a fiery, nuclear armageddon.

Another is enslavement. The Matrix (1999) is perhaps the most famous example here, where a robotic society has forcefully plugged humanity into an alternate reality to take advantage of their collective body heat. A more recent example is the last season of Westworld (2016–2022), where the "hosts" repurposed our dependency on screens to make us more obedient (see Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination).

However, in Chants of Sennaar, we get another rarer example — pacification.

The AI in question has not enslaved or exterminated the society the player has come across, the "Anchorites," but curated a virtual world where residents have voluntarily plugged in. When you reach the uppermost level, you come across citizens detached from the other societies, both socially and physically. These beings, called "Fairies" by the prior level, are so disconnected from those beneath them that they have become myths, but their removal is less fantastical and more depressing — they have given up on interacting with the physical world.

Your character walks the rain-soaked streets — an almost cyberpunk aesthetic bleeding in — as you observe row after row of plugged-in Anchorites slumped in their chairs for such long periods that some might be actual corpses.

The entity facilitating the Anchorites's disconnection is an AI called "Exile," which does not want you to end its people's isolation. An Anchorite sends you on a scavenger hunt to restore the communication arrays throughout the tower, and Exile blocks your progress with killer robots you have to sneak past. When this fails, Exile envelops you into a distorted virtual reality, a heightened one similar to what the Anchorites occupy themselves in. It tries to stop you from letting language flow freely between all the tower's levels.

It may seem strange for a language game to have an AI antagonist, but it's pretty topical. Modern AI is not generalized intelligence — we do not have a working definition of intelligence, let alone the ability to recreate it — but rather a predictive algorithm fed an Internet's worth of data. It's through these examples, as well as the human labor used to weed out errors, that language models like ChatGPT can function. It makes sense that the villain of this Game is an AI because the way such models work is the opposite of Chants of Sennaar. AI does not struggle through contextual examples but is fed every iteration of an answer key, infinitum, hoping to use that data to predict a distinctive iteration. Modern AI replaces the frustrating and exciting elements of language learning with a voice telling you an answer.

Of course, the easiest way for an AI to give you that answer is for a language to stay predictable and static—to stifle the interplay between cultures that leads to new words and rules. That is the very thing that has happened in the game.

Yet, again, Exile was not some master plan of a robotic overlord seeking conquest but something the Anchorites brought on willfully in reaction to human difference. As one of the Anchorites tells your character: "Foreign [people] came to the tower. [We] stopped talking [with each other]. [Everyone] feared [each other.] My people left in exile."

In response to contact with other humans, the Anchorites wanted to remain static and not change their society. So, they created Exile, which ensured that would happen, allowing a rigid caste system beneath them to fall into place.

A nuanced conversation on AI

Chants of Sennaar is a beautiful game. Progressing through the various levels is like taking those first steps into a new land. You see a window into small, intimate moments that feel all too real in the way only some of the best fiction can do.

This game also symbolizes what happens when we stop talking to one another. When we let the fear of human difference alienate us from our fellow man. It is a cautionary tale against the screens and machines we have put in front of us to block out our contact with the world and from the people who make us uncomfortable.

Many of our previous conversations about AI in pop culture have been quite simplistic. Creators have often depicted it as a force apart from humanity—something seeking to destroy or enslave us. AI is an "other" that we cannot relate to. Skynet and the central intelligence of The Matrix are so anti-human that they might as well be aliens conquering us from beyond the stars.

However, as AI's development accelerates, the reality of its depiction in media has become more nuanced. We are not dealing with aliens that will turn us all into paper clips but a tool that can be designed to amplify some of our worst impulses. From this perspective, AI is not something separate from us but an extension of humanity and, in the current context, our capitalist system.

In Chants of Sennaar, an AI is used to block out the world. We decide how its application will unfold in our future.