but a.i. can't convince me my ex-boyfriends loved me
on unanswerable questions of the human condition
There’s a lot of great things A.I. can do, a topic that has many people buzzing. It’s going to change the face of content marketing! Health care scribing will never be the same! Artists will be fighting tooth and nail now for rights to their work! It can improve customer service! So much good stuff!
People feel disturbed. People feel excited. Everyone’s buzzing super hard.
Me? I’m not gonna exhaust every debate about what A.I. should or shouldn’t be used for, because there’s a million articles out there that talk about this already. I think it can be really complementary to our existence, and this is probably not a new thought. I have nothing really new to add logically.
But emotionally, I’ve been thinking from the perspective of A.I. granting me numbers of wishes. Since everyone talks about the implications of A.I. being able to do stuff, I guess I’ve fixated on what it can’t do.
Which is provide me closure.
Which is to actually replace the humans around us, especially the ones that haunt our memories.
I feel like A.I. has left me with more yearning than before I learned of its existence. The first time I used ChatGPT, I was pretty impressed with how it could help me organize my life, or suggest logical solutions to problems I couldn’t come up with.
But when I got super lonely, when I felt strapped for actual human comfort from specific people that I was grieving, I felt mad that it isn’t yet time for my wishful thinking about others to be answered by technology. In fact, it may never be time.
And maybe it’s stupid, and maybe everyone relates to this already, but I hate that A.I. can’t make easy what makes us human to face. It can’t take away the pain of yesterday, or the situations that still make my nervous system ignite on fire, or replace my mistakes with fresh second chances. A.I. can’t stop you from paying the price for loving, and maybe it shouldn’t.
The episode “Be Right Back” from Black Mirror, Season 2 features a woman desperately trying to reconnect with her dead husband through A.I. This artificial consciousness of “Ash” is made using all of his past social media and online communications. It even looks like him… but it isn’t him, as Martha eventually regretfully realizes. The uncanny valley aspect of it just never sits right with her. It should be human, but it isn’t.
I suggest streaming it on Netflix and seeing for yourself. This was probably one of the most memorable TV episodes I’ve ever seen. I watched it in 2013, a good 10 years ago oh god, but I remember thinking about the future of A.I. at the time. I remember being excited, and then sad. The lesson — even though it was fictional and further away back then — was that you cannot rely on A.I. to solve every problem you have.
No one’s probably expecting it to. But I can’t ignore being weirdly depressed that, with each possibility opening, the inverse of those possibilities — what can’t be realized yet — does leave a residue in your heart.
What made me actually sad was that even at its best, A.I. would never be able to replicate experiences, conversations, emotions I’d had with people who weren’t in my life anymore.
I related hard to Martha in that episode, which was eerie considering it was 3 years early to the era where I lost multiple friends to suicide, cancer, or mysterious illness. I related already because I thought of people that felt fenced off to me, inaccessible, who’d blocked me out and didn’t want to let me in. I knew robots couldn’t help me properly grieve that.
A.I. wouldn’t be able to sufficiently help me wrap my head around whether “A” had ever had feelings for me, if “J” still thinks about me, if “E” regrets being so bitchy to me in middle school…
A.I. wouldn’t be able to do the disagreeable bits that made these people human. The way “A” would nervous-laugh when he didn’t want to answer a question, the way “J” would be sarcastic to me when I didn’t cooperate with him, the way “E” would start breaking into song randomly when her favorite K-pop album came on shuffle.
A.I. can’t do that shit.
I know this is probably an inane perspective, considering everyone has bigger problems than their high school bullies to think about where it concerns A.I.
But the eternal debate and discussion just made me think very carefully about what I can’t hand over to A.I. to make my life easier. The parts that, for better or for worse, bring color to me.
I can’t have A.I. give me a pep talk when push comes to shove, or cheer myself up in any lasting way when my demons haunt me.
Its existence makes me angry it can’t make my life easy in the ways that actually bog me down, when I’m stuck in bed because I’m wracked with self loathing over not being fully yet the person I want to be.
And maybe that’s why I’m grateful for A.I. It highlights the kinds of things we can’t hand off to it — nor may ever be able to hand off to it.
It can’t give me the closure I seek, or convince me my ex-boyfriends loved me or that my mother deserves my respect or that I don’t have to be perfect to deserve a place at the table.
Can any human — besides myself — even do that for me, which I have to do for me?
Well. I guess now is the era I’ll have to find out for myself.