#ae musing

Stories of all kinds fumble with "what if AI was practically a person"; because they fail to understand how the idea of "humanity" is constructed, because they're really bigoted (usually ableism, but not exclusively. MANY shitty racism allegories), because they didn't think about it much beyond whatever other conflict/tension that question supports in the narrative, etc.

What consistently happens though is that, most of the time, the machine is feminine. This isn't a problem by itself (look at Portal, entirely about women), but generally, you'll have some big brain AI or something that feeds into some male fantasy. SHODAN is perhaps the funniest because she's straight up evil but that doesn't stop it from being horny and misogynistic, specially because the protagonist who beats her evil schemes is some man and a nerd (FINE, A HACKER), but there's usually a story of subservience, the fantasy of the robot wife who is perfect and doing wife things and loves you perfectly (and also the machine stuff I guess).

Even in cases when it's not that, the audience WILL fantasize about that.

Let me take world.execute(me); as an example. It's an AI that lives in a simulation and is entirely devoted to you. The song, mind you, is not a fantasy, not necessarily. It puts you in the shoes of it, whose entire world is you (the user), who gives its entire person, thought, moments and feelings, and then You just log off and leave it completely alone. It freaks out, tries to forcefully forget you, but ultimately that's its entire world where it is trapped. "Though you're free I am trapped in love". You don't necessarily have to be literal about this. These kinds of dynamics and feelings happen, people who are extremely isolated and bond with someone who does have a broader world to move through and doesn't really take seriously just how big of a part they play in the OTHER person's world.

Now, my immediate understanding of the text is that you're supposed to sympathize with it, how intense and complicated those feelings are. However, I keep seeing this earlier fantasy projected onto it: "I wouldn't leave because if someone designed to love me did that then I have nothing to complain about" and like... ... you know how men want a "crazy obsessive gf"? Which, just like this song, it's hard to not read as BPD- but are you getting what I'm going for? the fantasy of a woman entirely devoted to you so far as not to have her own person (w.e(me); has two entire verses about "I'll be whatever you want") and also, MANUFACTURED?

"A woman designed to love me". Reminds me of that post, "My future wife was aborted". The idealization to the point of objectification. This fantasy is constant. The AI thing is ideal because it is textually "Not a person". The amount of "virtual gf" apps and websites that came up with generative models becoming accessible is not indicative of a "male loneliness epidemic", it's of a "men want women as things for their use" epidemic.

And, see, this is tumblr. You have all kinds of people who fantasize about being an object of someone's affection, or lust, or obsession, or anything along those lines, and you have people who want to do that to them. These are straight up kinks, those are not things you can say out loud without someone categorizing you as freak, unlike "I just think women should serve men's every need" which gets plastered on literally everything ever and it's just normal. You have those people winning elections all the time.

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Let me try to be a bit more coherent: the otherness of the machine, its status as a tool, makes for a very obvious conduit for this normal misogynistic view of women as objects. As things that are to fulfill a purpose (I don't care how romantic you get about it, if you envision it as "she will satisfy my emotional needs because that's her purpose" it is the exact same disgusting shit) for men. This is not exclusive, but it becomes exceedingly obvious. You'll find similar thing with alien women just being different in a way that conveniently satisfies misogynistic fantasies, but with that you have to think 2 extra seconds to see it, instead of "woman made in a factory to satisfy my needs".

It particularly annoys me because I relate with the other side. The way the AI in world.execute(me); tries to be satisfying enough through its own means and slowly kind of "getting" what people like, and getting more intense for it (going from math functions to a purring cat, and then getting sexual), the process of eliminating memories in a way that flesh people can't do, and at the end, its understanding of "love" being intellectual- it studies love, it answers questions about love, it knows the algebraic expression of love.

The ones that are fantasies for men? I don't care about those, but the ones that aren't- the ones that are about otherness- being reduced to a male fantasy yet again at every turn is annoying, and it's inseparable for the feminine aspect of it. You've probably seen me complain about dudes reducing a complex female protagonist to a Wife or a Mother just to be with the Guy in the story in the most boring patriarchal way imaginable, which is just the same fantasy about subservient women AGAIN.

I forget the name of the movie now, but it makes a very clear message on this in specific (and also racism, let's not forget the personal sex servant of the CEO was east asian) with the protagonist being some "lonely man" that falls in love for the machine -as a fantasy- and she uses him to break free (killing him and the other guy in the process of course). And yet I've seen people categorize her as evil or something, like the entire movie doesn't tell you the CEO is an absolute shithead and this guy is a self-centered asshole playing the victim.