I can’t say I recommend the breathless AI girlfriend thinkpiece in this week’s New Yorker. It reminds me of the Sam Altman move of waving your hands about how scary AI is and how it’s going to change everything, all just so we give him our attention and investment dollars. Here the message seems to be: get afraid that your kid will soon be dating their telephone’s operating system. (?!) This makes a good deal more sense when you google the article’s author (Jaron Lanier) and realize that for the last 19 years he’s been working at OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft. It’s telling that he’s chosen to mix his labor with the most charmless of the evil five; of course he indulges the thrill of worrying about AI. (Kate Folk dealt with this whole train of thought more succinctly and with infinitely more humor and insight in her short stories “Out There” and “Sur”.) All that said, I did crack a smile with this sentence:
A.I. conferences and gatherings often include a person or two who loudly announces that she is in a relationship with an A.I. or desires to be in one.
My brother in Christ, no matter what the New Yorker’s style guide says, the indefinite pronoun you are looking for is they.
