ai, neurodiversity, bullying, fears

When I first tried VR, I played a game called "The Climb." It's a rock-climbing game that gives the illusion of being very high in the air as you reach for handholds and dangle from cliffs. The first time I played it, I couldn't do it. I was paralyzed, and even though I knew that I was perfectly safe, the fear of losing my grip and falling was so overwhelming that I could not bring myself to reach for the next hold. 

I own a VR headset and use it often for fitness applications. It's a fun and easy way to keep moving. I've had it for about a year and a half now. I tried "The Climb" again not too long ago. I knew that I was in a virtual environment and my body did not react to the height illusion at all. The visceral paralyzing fear was gone. The illusion was broken and it was just another pretend experience, like a TV show.

I think it's the same with most new technology. At first, it seems very convincing and immersive; then, the illusion breaks and it seems almost silly that we ever felt that way. I think how 1990's video games were absorbing to me then, but if I try to play them now they seem so simple as to be dull and unplayable. Early CGI that was fascinating and convincing looks cartoonish now. We learn to see the seams.

Currently, I'm seeing fear over the advances in AI technology. Artists are afraid that their livelihoods are threatened, teachers are worries about AI-generated homework assignments, content creators are wondering how this will affect their jobs, and almost everything I see about AI applications includes this visceral fear of the new technology. I don't know if those fears are unfounded and I don't blame those who are afraid of the potential effects of this new technology. However, I can already see the frayed edges of AI content. Soon, it will be as obvious as 90's CGI to most people. I think teachers will become good at spotting chatbot essays, and AI art will be seen as lowbrow, cheesy and cheap and inferior to human-made design, and these technologies will integrate into our lives in ways both useful and pernicious, as with any other new tech. As with any other new tech, certain jobs will become obsolete, others will open up, and life will go on. I don't see this to be qualitatively different from the introduction of photography. It will change things. It won't lead to the singularity or the end of the world. It won't steal our souls. 

Yesterday, someone accused my partner of being an AI on his Facebook page, going so far as to warn people on her page about him, as though she was quite sure he was an AI and was quite sure that this was a bad thing. People have been acting in unhinged, disconnected ways on the Internet for a long time. This seemed like just another one, and we joked about it, but there is something about it that unsettled me: she identified his presumed inhumanity with what she saw as defects in his speech patterns. His voice was not right for a human voice.

My husband and I are both on the autism spectrum. Being called a robot is a pretty familiar ableist slur to those of us over here in neurodivergent land. Until now, it hasn't been meant literally. When someone has dehumanized me for my neurology, it's always been a metaphor. They really mean that I'm not the correct type of human, and while that is shitty and rude, it's shitty and rude in a depressingly normal way that almost everyone experiences at some point. I think this is the first time that I have seen an autistic person literally being told that he is not human. 

The thing about bullies is that they often don't know that they are bullies. They think they are enforcing a social standard and that those who fall outside the standard deserve abuse. They reaffirm their allegiance to the dominant culture and reinforce their standing as insiders in their social group. It's an expression of anxiety, turned outward into aggression at the other. Millions have been murdered based on this principle, so telling people to be nice isn't going to cut it. The ones doing the bullying think they are nice. They're the good people, so hurting the outsider can't be bad. New ways to other the outsider will be seized on because they become new ways of soothing that anxiety. It's not something that can be avoided. It's also frightening. 

I worry that one of the shifts that AI will bring to online spaces is the need to prove our humanity by proving that we are more like the dominant culture. More masking means more energy spent mimicking "normal" human speech and more silencing of divergent voices. It's ironic that this is the same task that an AI faces: learning how to adjust patterns to better imitate a style of communication. It's something that autistic people have been doing all our lives, so it's no wonder we sound like robots to the neurotypical. We have to do it in order to be seen as human. The difference is that we are actually human, in every single way, and to dehumanize us is painful. We mask to avoid that pain, but masking itself can be painful. 

One of the reasons my husband enjoys his Facebook page is because it's his space to post without masking. He regularly angers, puzzles or intrigues people (sometimes all at once) with his perspective and his way of putting things. It's an outlet from the controlled persona he needs for his job, and low-stakes, since anyone who doesn't want to hear him can simply unfriend or ignore him. The Internet has been that way for a lot of us on the spectrum, right from the start. We can't be ourselves at school, work, and sometimes even at home, and we expend enormous amounts of energy on self-control, but with an anonymizing handle and an internet space we can take the mask off and be ourselves. 

I hope that as people learn to recognize computer-generated content, they also learn that not everybody is like them and it is possible to be human without sounding like whatever stereotype of humanity exists in their world. I admit, though, like the artists and writers who are worried about their own domains, I am worried that there is a new way at hand to dehumanize that allows the bully to even further justify their own actions, and removes even the slight brake on bad behavior that knowing the person you are being shitty to is a fellow human can provide. 

I don't have an answer for this. I just know that being dehumanized, even in a low-stakes space like Facebook, is painful in a way that goes very deep.