I RECEIVED A TEXT MESSAGE from my editor: “Um, is it unethical to ask you to get an AI bf?? You can prob say no.”
Resentment. Contempt! Sorrow. Unease. I love text messaging. I have text message exchanges with, let’s say, fifteen people per day. If you want me to do something, you should ask via text message. My editor knows this. She also knows, though it’s more complicated, that I love boyfriends. An AI boyfriend is a boyfriend who always, only texts back, immediately.
I had never looked at a chatbot interface before I received my editor’s message, out of a conviction that chatbots have no place in the society I want to live in, which does not exist and never will. I am also repelled by the topic of AI in general. When Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, integrated “AI experiences” into the app, it felt like a small betrayal, the first sign a long relationship could end. Of course, I already use artificial intelligence for administrative tasks—translation, transcription, taxes—and I can’t deny that it improves, or at least simplifies, my life. But I believe talking to an AI directly, as if it were a person, is a capitulation to the enemy, an acquiescence to a warped vision of the world in which what I care about most, other people, could be eliminated in pursuit of total seamlessness.
