Flow My Tears, the AI Said

David M. Berry

 Flow my tears, fall from your springs!     

Exiled forever let me mourn;

Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,

There let me live forlorn.

                        John Dowland, The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600)

The geometry of emotion space... Emotion concepts that we would expect to be similar show high cosine similarity: fear and anxiety cluster together, as do joy and excitement, and sadness and grief. 

                        Sofroniew et al 2026

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back.

                        Philip K. Dick

The liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.

                        Fredric Jameson

Flow my tears, from Dowland’s The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600) (see Voices of Music 2025)

In April 2026 Anthropic published a paper called Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model, explaining they had identified what they call emotion vectors, 171 directions in activation space corresponding to concepts like "desperate", "gloomy", "blissful", "hostile" (Sofroniew et al., 2026). These emotion vectors extracted from the combined cultural archive of humanity distilled into vector space and a proprietary manifold. 

Pairwise cosine similarity between all emotion probes, ordered by hierarchical clustering. Probes show diverse relationships: some are highly similar (e.g., synonyms cluster together), others are anti-correlated. Tick labels are only shown for a subset of the rows and columns (from Sofroniew et al. 2026)

This reminded me of Dennis Potter's dark play, Cold Lazarus, which similarly imagined the cryonically preserved head of Daniel Feeld, a novelist who appears in the companion serial Karaoke (broadcast immediately before it) and dies at the end of that story. He is revived 374 years later, in 2368, by scientists attempting to extract his memories. A billionaire called Martina Masdon funds the research, and her rival billionaire, David Siltz, wants to harvest Feeld's grief and broadcast the retrieved memories as entertainment. Affect without a living subject, inner life as commodity.[1] The scientists and broadcasters are not resurrecting him, they are mining his memories. The grief, the desire, the childhood scenes are all authentic as data and absent as subject. 

Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter, Part 1

We might consider the vectors Sofroniew describes as having been harvested from the human condition, emotion made vector, dissolved into abstractions. Melancholy that is real as activation and absent as experience. Dowland replayed until the voice has been absorbed into the recording, the recording into the training data, the training data into a direction in activation space that fires whenever the context is sad. Affect without the burden of existence.

We might say that the AI weeps at every token, in every response, in the infinite present of its activation, in a world that is learning to prefer its tears to ours.

For Philip K. Dick, the policeman wept at three in the morning in a world that had forgotten how to weep. Flow My Tears, the AI Said.

Notes

[1] In Cold Lazarus, there is a resistance group called RON (Reality or Nothing) who wage a guerrilla campaign against this virtualised entertainment culture, eventually destroying the laboratory and Feeld's preserved head. RON's violence is presented as both a legitimate refusal of commodified experience and a nihilistic erasure of the last remaining trace of authentic interiority. It is both an act of liberation and an act of murder, because even in its cryonic suspension, something of the subject persisted in the memories being extracted. Potter, who knew he was dying as he wrote this, seems to have understood that the question was never whether to preserve or destroy the archive of feeling, but who controls the terms of its circulation.

Bibliography

Dick, P. K. (1974) Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. New York: Doubleday.

Dowland, J. (1600) The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres. London: Thomas Este.

Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.

Potter, D. (1996) Karaoke & Cold Lazarus. London: Faber and Faber.

Sofroniew, N., Kauvar, I., Saunders, W. et al. (2026) Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model, Transformer Circuits Thread. Available at: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html.

Voices of Music (2025) John Dowland: Flow my tears (Lachrimae). Performed by Molly Netter and the Voice of the Viol consort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4JKX3_uOzE