Megan Sullivan

um about this issue and as i said like ai is a field day for philosophers because it definitely feels like we've been training for these questions our whole lives here's a hot take i think that we are going to look back and realize that one of the biggest mistakes that we have made in the era this era of ai in the last like three years is giving ai's human personalities

like making them seem like they are people that could have virtues or vices, that could make jokes, that could be like Elon Musk if you use X, or that could be super moralistic if you use Claude.

I think that we should have never tried to give this software anything that resembles human personality.

It would have been so much better if it felt just a whole lot more like checking a card catalog at a library.

than trying to engage with an artificial person.

And I think philosophers are going to look back and think that was just a weird decision that we made about these products in 2022 that turned out to send us down this big rabbit hole for 10 years and maybe set us back morally in ways that we could have avoided.

Yeah, I think we should draw a distinction between ways in which we practice loving and what it means to really love.

So when I was a young adult, I was obsessed with the Harry Potter books.

I read all of them.

Even the last ones came out, I think, right when I was starting graduate school.

Read all the Harry Potter books.

And I was really invested in Harry Potter's life.

And watching Harry Potter's friendships with Ron and Hermione develop.

helped inform my ideas of what it means to be a caring friend and to be courageous.

Human beings since the dawn of fiction have practiced how to have human social virtues with fictional characters.

And it's totally reasonable that as AI becomes a part of our imagination and our media, that we will practice these virtues with artificial intelligence.

So there's one way of looking at what's happening with that older lady.

where she's just kind of like reading an interactive book with her AI that's helping spark her imagination, that's, you know, entertaining her, that's giving her ideas.

And that's, you know, totally healthy.

I mean, I guess I wish that, you know, she was spending more time with her family and loved ones.