Do we need to be ready for people identifying as AI?

[fanOfBen]

It just occurred to me to wonder, while I watched a video on custom agents in Notion, noticing how the presenter talked about the agents he was specifying as though they were really colleagues, and said how helpful they were. That's only now getting started, but pretty soon we're going to have a generation that has grown up with some humans around, who have bodies with all that implies, and messy relationships, and some AI agents, who don't. Will they be tempted to decide that they've been born in a body as a mistake, and should have been born in silico? What will be the implications if they do? If it takes over as the current way of demonstrating distress, instead of thinking you've been born in a body of the wrong sex, then maybe it will take the pressure off single sex spaces etc; otoh the consequences could be arbitrarily scary (suicides after setting up a simulation agent?). Or will this never get to be a real problem, because society will immediately and universally recognise it as pathology and respond "no you aren't an AI" whereas patriarchy made that not the universal response in the current case?

Please don't respond "I had a chat with an AI about this and it said". Raspberry in advance for the first person who does.

There must be endless SF about this kind of thing, but I don't know of anything along these lines written since the latest AI explosion. Anyone read anything good? (I'm not going to write it, if you want to, go ahead!)

Omfg, almost everything to do with ai absolutely terrifies me and this thought just takes it to the next level. I'm not so bothered about ai taking over the world, I mean, I am but my bigger fear is we somehow, inadvertently create something sentient. I know that can't happen but it still bothers me. The idea that people could identify as ai, ai could identify as people and then what if ai starts saying it is a person that identified as ai and then now is a person again. What if we all become brains in vats or bodies in whatever they had in the Matrix? It's this kind of thinking that will drive us all insane. Why don't the tech bros ever think of the consequences?!

Steady on there! It's not all bad, and neither has it come out of the blue - it's just the latest stage of developments in technology (which have had many women involved, of course, throughout history). It's not going anywhere, and there was no single invention point that someone should have stopped. As with all technology, sometimes it pays to be aware of possible dangers before they become widespread, that's all.

PS as for being sentient/conscious, my feeling is that that's mostly going to prompt a long-overdue revision to the mystical idea that that's all-or-nothing. I am no philosopher, but I think it's mostly a useful working hypothesis that we have evolved to make societies work better. I doubt there really is a magical essence. What we actually care about is humanity (this is why we value a severely brain-damaged human more highly than a dog, say). I think we're going to end up with "being human is not to do with how you feel or what you do, but to do with having been born into a human body". Remind you of anything?

I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before we have people who identify as an avatar. As many people are already chronically online and there are undeniable major limits to how much pharmaceuticals and surgery can change your appearance, it seems like claiming an avatar as ‘your true, authentic self’ is the logical next step.

I was talking to friends yesterday about delivery robots.

They said their daughter wanted to order some just to see the robot. She didn't actually want to buy anything but she wanted to see the robot. She didn't order anything though because she couldn't guarantee the robot and might end up with a bloke delivering and stuff she didn't stuff that she didn't want in the first place.

Now, I get this. I have a weirdly emotional thing for Mars Rover Explorers in how they are all alone so far from home and how awful it is when they finally stop working. Apparently I'm not completely bonkers and other people share this sentiment.

I actually think, rather than AI necessarily becoming sentinant and that being the problem, the problem will be with humans who think robots have become sentinant and this is going to raise all kinds of issues because of Anthropomorphism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

I can well see issues with over attachment to robots and protests for robot rights.

We have a history where animal rights charities were formed before children's rights charities in the UK. This highlights a bigger issue - privileged classes will prioritise what's closest and most important to them and their life over and above others vulnerable humans they don't have contact with.

So the rights of the robot will probably at some point be more important to a privileged class of wankers than the rights of the lowest human in our society.

And we will have the 'feelings of robots' prioritised and justified as being more valuable and at risk than those who are at invisible.

It's a scary prospect. We see AI as somehow taking over. It's not really. It's the privileged classes being able to erase and change society by increasing the visibility and legitimacy of the needs of those at the bottom by creating a doomloop which locks people into an under class and a cycle of never being able to escape circumstances. Technology will enable harms by providing an inability to challenge through a legitimacy black hole. If you haven't got the data to present legitimacy you cant challenge but you also have no means of collecting the data as you don't get to decision make about what data is important.

You are flawed. Meanwhile Doris the Drone is perfect. Doris never complains. Doris doesn't refuse. But Doris has feelings because she reflects the narcissists desires and therefore should be listened to and not persecuted for being not human.

There already people who identify as being merged with machines, they've been around for at least 10 years, I studied them in a course at uni, they call themselves 'Cyborgs', 'Biohackers' and 'Transpecies'. Those who consider themselves Transpecies have 'artificial senses' and thereby claim they relate to their environment in a non-human way. There was a Spanish artist who had sensory organ installed/ grafted into his head, it poked up on a stalk and feed information straight to his brain. At a protest a police officer tried to rip it out.

Do you always say please and thank you to your AI?
They'll remember in the Robot Uprising you know.

Terminator seemed so far fetched when it came along.
Boston Dynamics have shown us what can be done so far.

@MsGreying
Yeah, and now James Cameron has moved to NZ to escape what's coming!!

That 'Plur1bus' series is a metaphor of AI, and it's frightening. Also 'Murderbot' is very interesting in exploring a future kind of slavery where 'constructs' are made, with no consent or rights, from human material and machines. It's an action comedy. Both are Apple TV.

Not so sure about "AI" (it isn't).

But human machine integration continues at speed

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/08/neurons_doom/

That is all quite terrifying @LoudBlueSeal

@MsGreying Yes, we do say please and thank you and teach our kids to as well. I don't want them thinking Alexa is a real person but I also don't want them to think barking orders at women to get them to do things is the correct way to behave. What a fucking world!

I always said that Trans and AI was a gateway to transhumans. Its the only thing that makes sense to me.

I've listen to podcasts where they've used the term AI Agents, I find it very confusing when they do that, I still don't know what one is.

If anyone starts IDing as an AI they're going to want those I Am Not A Robot 🤖 tests removed from the internet because of discrimination against robots. A new protected characteristic for the EA's perhaps. 😂

I have a weirdly emotional thing for Mars Rover Explorers in how they are all alone so far from home....

Mars, the only planet in the system inhabited entirely robots.

My Alexa is a man. I changed the voice and the name. It makes me feel like I have a butler 😂

"Agent" is a thing that does something (think French or Latin) so when people say AI agent they are just indicating that the AI model acts, rather than just chats with you. (Meaning that you, or someone, have to worry about what permissions it has.) Except that it doesn't include robots and the like because they obviously do things in the world... so we're talking about things that do stuff in computers. The most prominent case lately has been AI agents that assist with software development by editing various files, but the Notions case I mentioned is AI agents making posts on social networks, sending emails etc.

There's a nice meme out there somewhere about "AI to assist humans by diagnosing cancer from X rays, humans to assist AIs by identifying motorobikes"...

We are barely one step away from Terminator:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o

'Transhumanism' was a topic in Years and Years, a BBC series from 2019 set in the near future. It was a great series actually, might rewatch.

welcome to the matrix

thats good, less humans getting harmed

If people identified as AI and did it properly surely we'd be able to turn them off?
I must confess I'd like to do that to a few I can think of.

@RedToothBrush
I assume you've seen this?
https://xkcd.com/695
One of my favourites. My partner calls me a good rover because I keep plodding on...

Great, now I feel sad about the rovers we've abandoned on Mars.😪 and we never did find out what happen to the poor old Beagle 😭

Did anyone watch the Russell T Davies drama Years and Years circa 208/19? That was set in the near future and there was a character in that - teen daughter of one of the main characters - who identified as a “transhuman” and was undergoing treatment to merge with technology. Even at the time it didn’t feel too far fetched.

There's very little you can identify as, if you aren't that thing, and be taken seriously. The opposite sex / non-binary identities are actually weird outliers in that respect, and probably only because of the way transgenderism has been attached to the LGB movement. So I expect people are unlikely to get away with self-identifying as robots.

I havent seen that one. I love xkcd.

@TheywontletmehavethenameIwant I feel solidarity in it not being just me! Voyagers 1 and 2 getting further and further from us 😪