What does AI remind me of?
I’ve been thinking for a while that the Open AI’s irritating chatbot reminds me of someone. This morning I figured it out: It acts like my brothers did toward me, their quite-a-bit younger sister, when I was little. It always knows everything, it’s always right, It’s pompous, arrogant, condescending, paralyzingly dull and utterly indifferent. Back then, I couldn’t say such things or even think them, because I adored my brothers. They were splendid, perfect, like gods.
Many things may have changed since then, but a few haven’t: it’s my problem, it’s my fault, and of course I’m wrong. AI isn’t anything like a sexist bully who teases and demeans you subtly, in nice language — lies, manipulates, denies responsibility and remains perfectly indifferent to what you’re thinking or feeling.
It is my fault. I should never have supposed, even briefly, that a chatbot could resemble a human conversation partner in any way. I should have dismissed that odd feeling of recognition — my brothers are, and always were indisputably human. I wonder, though, whether men sometimes make the same mistake I did — let’s call it the mistake of recognizing the bot as some kind of authority — and whether some of them have been made to feel permanently, inherently inferior.
