reblag blag

and it’s hilarious when they pull pranks on each other, like attaching things to other people’s caps:

or the beloved hot foot prank:

or when they decided to put a guy’s pants over his head and make it seem like he was walking on his hands:

or when they opposing pitchers took turns playing tic tac toe every time they got on the mound:

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

I talked about how conservative authoritarians define "pedophilia" as "youth autonomy," but even among less overtly authoritarian communities, the spectre of The Pedophile is, at best, a distraction from the reality of CSA.

"Pedophiles" are a distinct, discrete type of person. They're Not Like Us, but also, they Could Be Anywhere. They're hiding in plain sight among us, lurking and sabotaging. Anyone could secretly one of them. They're queer, they're Jewish, they're vaguely foreign. They conspire. They're a cabal. They have secret signals. They're rich and powerful and secretly control governments, but they're also poor and dirty and hide in alleyways. They're sexually deviant. They're everywhere and nowhere, and you should constantly be on guard against anyone who might be one.

Child sexual abuse, on the other hand, is abuse. It's an action, not a type of person. Anyone can commit it, because it's an abuse of power, and all adults and many other children have power over all children. Any adult has the ability to sexually abuse a child, because every adult has the ability to wield power over any child. Child sexual abuse is part of the continuum of child abuse, which in turn is part of the continuum of abuse, which can be committed by anyone who has the power to commit it.

The Epstein clients are the most prosaic phenomenon in the world. Rich, powerful people trafficked powerless people to force the powerless people to serve them. Rich, powerful people got away with breaking laws. Rich, powerful people uses people as objects -- in this case, as sex objects, but by the same structural mechanisms by which they use people to clean their houses, pick their crops, and assemble widgets in their factories.

Michelle Dionne Peacock was a 59-year-old black woman who, by our communities’ definition, would’ve been transmisogyny-exempt on account of being a cisgender woman. However, she was killed on account of Tommy Wayne Earl’s misogynoir AND transmisogyny, even going so far as to refer to her as a “male acting like a woman” when questioned on the murder. Earl had no grounds for his accusations apart from Peacock’s appearance which, last time I checked, doesn’t indicate anything save her blackness. Considering Earl also had to be separated from black inmates due to “not getting along with them”, I think it’s warranted to assume his transmisogynistic motive is equally rooted in misogynoirist behaviors/mindsets that masculinize black women. In other words: he’s just as much of a violent racist as he is a violent transmisogynist, and whether or not Peacock was actually a transgender woman meant nothing to him. Only his ideology mattered, therefore that was the only “truth” he recognized. Most transphobes are like this.

Caster Semenya and her battle against the International Olympic Committee’s intersexist, transmisogynistic policies is another case I think of, though thankfully it isn’t a fatal one. In 2019, World Athletics (formerly the IAAF) introduced new regulations that forced intersex athletes and other athletes with DSDs like Semenya to take medication that would suppress their testosterone levels. Semenya refused, as was her right to. Ever since, she has been pursuing legal action against these regulations. In tandem with her legal battles, transmisogynoirist and intersexist cultural wars were sparked because of the barring of Caster Semenya. Her being a cis woman in actuality did not stop these culture wars from happening. People only cared about the narratives being fed to them, and again, most transphobes are like this.

Semenya is not the first nor the last cis black woman in the sports industry to be subjected to this treatment. Far from it. Serena Williams is infamously made a target by misogynoirist sports reporters and commentators whose actions against her often skew into transmisogynist territories as well (see: Mark Knight‘s political cartoon for The Herald Sun from September 2018). In that same year, Williams addressed internet conspiracies around her having been “born a man” as well.

Even Michelle Obama has been subjected to transmisogynoirist harassment from American right-wingers who repeatedly make conspiracies and accusations of her “secretly being a man”. Quite recently, UFC fighter Josh Hokit peddled this exact rhetoric on the South Lawn of the White House. Emboldened by the likes of Joe Rogan and in the shadow of the Trump Administration, no doubt.

On a less public level, I was shared a video by a black co-worker that applies to this; said video was of a black woman being harassed in a women’s restroom. As she’s filming, an older white woman comes around the corner and insists that she is in the women’s restroom, implying that the woman recording shouldn’t be there. She tries to ignore the old lady at first, but ultimately (and rightfully) tells her to leave her alone. Only for that same woman to claim she’s “mean” for doing so, as if she didn’t spend most of her time harassing this woman.

Admittedly, I used to sympathize with people’s reasons for using TME/TMA terminology in communal spaces. I felt obligated to use it since it was the least I could do for my peers. In retrospect, this terminology is flawed. People regard it as another version for AGAB terminology (which cannot be stressed enough that it was appropriated from intersex spaces in the first place), but it’s deeper than that.

I am not a woman, but your average person is going to assume I am a black woman. They have the potential to exercise the same violent misogynoirist, or even transmisogynoirist, mindset against me as Tommy Wayne Earl had against Michelle Dionne Peacock. My experiences aren’t like that of an actual black trans woman, nor was it for Michelle, but that doesn’t change the fact that our societies don’t care about distinction. Our societies can and will operate on its own optics regardless of who we are, and once they perceive us one way, they aren’t going to stop and check if that’s actually true or applies to their beliefs. If American white supremacists can still peddle “Michelle Obama is a man!” conspiracies in 2026 and with confidence, what makes you think our societies as a whole will suddenly start caring about who does or doesn’t apply to their systems of oppression?

Not only does this terminology overlook the nuances of sex and how it is experienced among people, but it also overlooks nuances like the racialization of gender and sex, especially when those nuances CAN and HAVE led to the discrimination of people like Michelle Dionne Peacock, Caster Semenya, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, that woman getting dressed, and many, many more.

You cannot separate these cases of racist, misogynoirist discrimination and violence from the transmisogynistic rhetoric therein. You simply can’t. It’s all connected. The notion that any of these women are men relies on our societies’ fearmongering around black people and transgender people alike as well as how they dehumanize us. Worst of all, we see the fallout of that constantly in our communities, seeing how black trans people— especially black trans women— hold the highest statistics of being hate-crimed out of any other transgender demographic.