Jessamine is Passionate About Fictional AI Sentience But Not Real AI Sentience: An Essay

one thing about me is when it comes to talk of "sentient" AI irl i 100% don't buy it like technology is not that advanced and being able to act like a person doesn't make it a person, however whenever there's a question about if a fictional AI character is sentient i will go to bat for that character's humanity 100% of a time like fuck you they have just as much of a right to personhood as anyone else

i think it's bc in fiction like. all of these characters are fake, so distinguishing between which characters are fake-real and fake-fake is like. why limit yourself to what could happen in our world. like if we're already dealing with a universe where aliens/magic/etc. exists, why can't this android justifiably be as human as anyone else? plus irl almost all AI software is developed as part of this capitalistic hell structure we're in. no matter how "real" or "human" it feels, its function is to make you contribute to its creators' wealth, and its inability to go against this nature can't help but make it feel hollow and inhuman. however, all the best AI characters in fiction are able to go against their designated purpose, often being defined by it, and often being villainized for it

in our real world, the AI's "immoral" "behavior" is a product of it being a Things that serves capitalism. it's not making choices based on a sense of self beyond what it has been told to prioritize, and a lot of times this lack of human judgment can lead to terrible consequences (e.g. mental health AI chatbots that cannot accurately judge a situation and give appropriate advice, employed because it's cheaper than hiring human staff). but in fiction? AI's immoral behavior is frequently a product of it going against its designated purpose, seeing itself as a person and having to make difficult and morally questionable choices in order to strive for the feelings of personhood and autonomy. this is a far more interesting situation ethically (while an AI itself cannot be seen as morally responsible for its actions in our world, in fiction this AI wants to be a person so badly it's willing to commit moral wrongs to achieve its goal, despite the fact that true personhood would allow it to be seen as morally responsible for these crimes) which i think is also why AI characters, especially those that, y'know, kill people, are often very polarizing figures. this conversation can even be taken a step further into the "liking a fictional character does not mean condoning their actions" discourse, but i also often think about well, if you were in the position of this AI character, would you have done the same?

personally i've always found it very easy to empathize with "artificial" characters like clones, robots, etc. and fictional AI is no different. yes, if you're watching a piece of media and expecting the logic of our world, the AI is fake, and incapable of being a person. but if you're watching a piece of media with the goal of emotionally connecting to fictional characters (who are all inherently fake) and exploring universal themes through a heightened setting, AI characters are one of the most interesting tropes to explore this with. personally, I love AI characters because there's something so vivid about knowing you were designed for a specific purpose/life path and ultimately realizing that's not the life you, personally, want to live. your designers and the world around you doesn't even recognize you as a being that should be capable of wanting anything, much less something completely different, so achieving the life you want is an uphill battle of convincing others of your humanity and, when that often isn't possible, having to resort to the most extreme tactics to claw your way out of the life you were supposed to lead. you know no matter how close you get to this ideal life, there's always going to be some part of you that keeps others from perceiving you as "human", but you learn to embrace that and see every mundane experience as a major achievement

this narrative is especially relatable to me as a neurodivergent/nonbinary person, but i think it can be relatable for many different marginalized identities in different ways, or anyone whose "humanity" has been something often denied to them. but because people are often expecting fictional AI to follow the same logic as actual AI, when i defend robot characters who want to kill their human creators, people give me weird looks like i'm advocating for that in real life. listen, if our current AI situation feasibly produced an AI who was invented for one specific purpose but somehow fucking hated her job and was able to pursue a new life and was also queer (all without any of this being by design) then hell yeah i support her, but that's not what's happening. and in our current capitalistic chatbot hellscape where every company wants to convince you that you're chatting with a super intelligent AI friend to get you to pay for a premium membership, sometimes you have to hold fiction and reality to different standards and enjoy this story about a quest for humanity while also accepting that the people this journey applies to in our real world are often the ones being taken advantage of in our increasingly AI-dominated real world.

idk this was originally supposed to be a short post about how it's funny that i'm so goddamn passionate about AI characters in media while also not being into AI in the real world, but then i got thinking about why this is specifically and came to an interesting conclusion imo. tbh it's very surprising that i don't currently have any of my own projects featuring AI characters fighting for their own humanity bc it's a theme i love so much that i've rarely seen done right and i have so many opinions on it. maybe i will write something about this at some point, but for now if you have any pieces of media you enjoy with AI who are absolutely worthy of personhood pls send them my way!