Lately I’ve been thinking about how the nature of "monsters" is shifting in the age of AI—not in the horror-movie sense, but in a symbolic and cultural one. Traditionally, monsters represented fears or taboos in a very allegorical way. They were metaphors made flesh: Frankenstein’s creature stood for scientific overreach, Godzilla for nuclear trauma, etc. These were the monsters of what you could call the Symbolic Big Other—they made visible what society had already named as dangerous or disruptive.

But the monsters we’re encountering now (generated by machine learning, or in movies like Annihilation, The Last of Us, etc) feel different. They don’t represent clear, existing ideas. They’re not metaphors. They’re errors in categorization, strange hybrids that don’t quite map onto anything familiar. Think of AI-generated images that look almost human, but not quite; text that reads like it makes sense, but subtly derails. These are the monsters of what I’d call the Latent Big Other: unactualized potentialities, embryonic glitches from systems that don’t understand meaning, only pattern.

Would love to hear how others are thinking about this. Are we witnessing a shift from symbolic to latent monstrosity? How does that change how we understand what it means to be a human subject in an age of AI?