AI can’t dance

This morning I was about to ask my friendly local chatbot (OpenAI) whether Zumba (the joyous, global, immensely popular dance-exercise franchise) is feminist. Luckily, I stopped myself. Just in the nick of time, I realized that anything it could possibly “say” [sic] on the subject would annoy me, and probably ruin what’s shaping up to be a perfectly nice day.

In olden times, it was generally understood that in polite conversation — “polite” being non-confrontational —  two topics should be avoided: politics and religion. The term “feminist” is at least political, and may border on the religious as well at times. The bot will answer “no” to the immediate question or blow a smokescreen around the whole issue because, well, it won’t find any conventional answer, and no answer can exactly be logical. It’s not that kind of question. To answer this question, you must speak from direct, immediate experience of a body.  It doesn’t have one.

For me, at least, Zumba is an invitation to syncopate your everyday march a bit, to shrug off — if briefly — some of the obligations that support identity maintenance. It lets you make moves completely out of character, act out unseemly states of mind, allows for a bit of flexibility and fun with whatever gender you have claimed, or that has claimed you.

AI may be useful for many things, but it is also literally witless, devoid of sparkle.  It offers pasteurized, homogenized authority on tap.  It can’t dance.