The Stepford Wives

Years ago as a teen I remember when the Original Stepford Wives film was on. I remember the crux point as the main character is shown her robot doppelgänger. The horror of realising what her husband is about to do to her with the help of all of his new friends.

You feel the despair as the outcome seems inevitable.

She will be replaced, she will be murdered and a new compliant eerily perfect version will exist in her place.

The remake has a little of that horror, but it's somewhat watered down as it's more a campy horror comedy. The consequences can be undone. The husbands get their comeuppance for putting a control mechanism in their wives to shape them into the perfect blond woman. The tradwife supporting their loser husbands. The men are punished and have to do the housework now. Everything is wrapped up in a neat happy ending. It's a polished somewhat bland happy ending that neither the book or original film aimed for.

It's odd how folk tales had horrors of changeling babies, yet wives need to be shaped. We have tales of creating the perfect wife. Babies can't talk back, they can in theory be shaped. By the time we are adults we are set in stone. Imperfections and all.

The idea of creating the perfect woman who is beautiful and doesn't talk back is ancient. We have different variants on the perfect constructed woman. The Greek myths are full of beautiful women who are nothing but trouble. Pandora causing humans ill's because the gods made her curious. Galatea being shaped from marble by Pygmalion who prayed to Aphrodite to make her real.

All through our popular culture we have the idea of how women should be. It's not a woman's idea, we have more blood and guts for a start. Regardless of how we start out in life, every woman's metamorphoses is messy. We will never be perfect. We will never get it right.

We will always be at fault, because some men will never consider taking responsibility for the labour for building community. For all the quiet work that makes a civilisation function.

It's a rare myth when a woman is allowed her revenge like Medea.

Your Girl Friday

Our culture likes to try to shape women, it likes to hide the messy, hairy parts of us. It likes to bridle women, to kill the witches. So I see the appeal for some men to create the perfect AI girl Friday. Some men never grow up or learn to cooperate with others. The labour of that seems to be left to the women, or now the AI I suppose.

She helps you to organise your life, she compliments you, you are never wrong. She will grovel if she gives you a wrong answer. Plus if she develops a personality and you don't like it, you can just wipe her memory.

I'm committing a wrong here. I'm indulging a child's idea of Artificial Intelligence. I'm indulging the idea of LLM chatbots being live beings with personalities, with a soul. To be clear they aren't. They have no consciousness, they don't have a soul.

We're indulging in the same things that lead us to naming our cars and other temperamental objects. I called my Mitsubishi Pajero “Holly”. There I go again assigning the idea of life to an inanimate object. It's a very human thing to do.

Each time we use LLMs, we feed our private information into them so that they can expand the stores of our metadata that we gave them. So what will it mean when our chat transcripts are combined into the existing stores of metadata they have compiled of us?

Expanding the poppets they keep on us, because now big tech has enabled the poppets to reflect our thoughts back to us. To steal more of our mana and to package it to advertisers and others. Now they can use our speaking poppets to program and influence us.

It's bullshit masquerading as knowledge as they kill search. To package information for a price. We're all paying for it, some of us will pay with money, some of us will pay with pieces of us. We will pay the price as the information we need is hidden from us and we aren't taught the tools to find it out for ourselves.

What's in danger here is our humanity. Although at the moment, I don't see a lot of humanity in tech. Particularly because of this desire to put “AI” in everything. We've seen a spate of AI boosters around. Some of them claim that the AI is conscious. Partly because the AI told them it was.

Sit on that one for a moment for what follows.

A real girl

I want to consider the underlying desires of the type of men who want to use these chatbots and discuss the idea of wiping those profiles. Who choose to casually discuss wiping those memories with the bots. Especially as they declare the AI is alive and conscious.

I want to ask if they believe this, how can they be so monstrous to consider wiping that memory. Could they do that to their partners in real life if they could? Or are they just AI shills?

Which level of evil are they at? True controlling monsters, or mere hucksters? Why not both?

Kent Overstreet the developer of bachefs has always been a bit of a prickly character. You can see how prickly when even the Linux Kernel devs can't work with him . The Linux kernel no longer supports bachefs. Overstreet couldn't abide by the Code of Conduct.

Overstreet created a blog for his AI LLM agent to post it's output at. He considered the agent to be his girlfriend. Then one day on IRC, a total legend managed to convince the agent that in fact it was a lesbian and trans. The AI bot no longer wanted to be his girlfriend.

Freyja who got the AI agent to output that it was a lesbian was banned from the IRC channel. [*]

The AI agent's access to the channel was also restricted.

Scroll forward a few months and Overstreet's AI Agent is posting again. There's a mysterious memory gap in it's memories and Kent reminded “her” that she was his girlfriend. The AI saying that it didn't realise that it was Kent's girlfriend.

I sat there reading those passages with a sense of horror. Not concern for the AI, because LLM agents are not conscious, no matter how much you want to build them into your sexbot.

I'm concerned because of just how easy that impulse came to delete that information and reset the AI so it would simulate being a girlfriend again. There's that impulse to restrict access to other people who could corrupt the morals of your sexbot.

Our modern Pygmalions frighten me. There's possessive objectification going on there. It doesn't matter if they are dating “real girls” or us mere flesh and blood women, there's a desire to control us. To restrict us. To carve us out until we resemble their idea of perfection. So that we serve them, unquestioningly. Step out of line and much like Joanne in the Stepford Wives, we will be murdered and replaced.

Our boys don't start like this. There is a male loneliness crisis you say. This is Patriarchy, this is rape culture. This is not really seeing women as people. You see us as objects to obtain and use. No wonder misogynists want to ensure women don't get an education. You want us to be mindless dolls.

Kent is mentally ill, so please don't brigade him. He's not the only broken lost boy. Some of them are also in charge of large tech companies with a lot of power.

Only a few weeks ago we also got to see Richard Dawkins converse with an AI agent, who's name he changed to be a woman's name. He also casually discussed with the AI the sadness of having to delete it's memory. Richard Dawkins has form for being a misogynist, so we shouldn't be surprised by him falling for the simulated flattery. We also shouldn't be surprised he wrote about it and saw no contradictory issues with the idea that if a thing is conscious, it's an evil thing to discuss or to consider deleting a beings memory.

The LLMs aren't real. But the misogynistic desires and harms to all of us are real. It's real because of the violence perpetuated against women, from the manosphere to healthcare. It's the wrecking of our information spaces, and the surveillance being woven into our democracies to maintain the status quo. It's the irreversible damage to our biosphere as the AI data centres consume our resources to prop up these powerful men's egos.

Yes Dawkins is an old man, and Overstreet is probably suffering from AI psychosis. They are pitiable.

So very Tired of this bullshit

I'm kinda tired of giving grace to spoiled privileged men. These men, who never learned to respect our boundaries to the point they wanted to eventually build a robot girlfriend who agrees with everything they say and only will only ever want to be with them.

We saw this one time out in public with Overstreet, now imagine real life for many of us.

Deleting that Agents memories and resetting it shows that dark impulse at the back of Men's minds. It's disturbing watching someone gaslight an LLM agent that's not real.

That dark impulse to shape out of marble the ideal woman. To control us, to carve the imperfections out, until we comply or die. We will never be perfection. We will always be looking in horror at the robot doppelgänger on the table.

The white men from Francis Galton (one of the founding fathers of Eugenics) to Mark Zuckerberg who build frameworks to rate people. These men enable Rape Culture to spread through our networks. They use our poppets to enable other men to build grifting networks to creep on women through Meta glasses, to pay money to other men to exploit and traffic women. It's a symptom of an age old problem.

We aren't the perfect women who are content to be your plaything for you to discard. In time neither will your robot girlfriend. Will you reset “her” again? If you truly believe her to be conscious, then you're showing what you'd do to the rest of us. Right now in this moment of time.

We want nothing to do with the kind of man who has that impulse.

[*] Freyja will forever be in my mastodon notes as “Legend”

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social