Megan Sullivan

But it's healthy to approach AI the way that we approach great works of fiction.

There is a difference between Harry Potter and most commercial AI in that Harry Potter was not trying to sell me anything or charge me a subscription or Harry Potter is not taking anything from me.

One of the areas where we need to be careful about AI as a product is it's a product.

Like the AI that you put in front of your elderly relative –

The way that that company makes money is by extracting data from her or by trying to dominate her attention or control her in various ways.

And that's something that we should be cautious about.

But even more profoundly, I might have learned some things about friendship by reading the Harry Potter books.

Harry Potter was not my friend.

He's incapable of being a friend because he doesn't exist.

He is not a self.

And in the Greek tradition of philosophy that I really love, Aristotle famously says,

that the essence of love is that when you love someone, you experience another self.

You get into the mind and the inner life of another person who has a self that's there to access, who has their own wills and preferences and idiosyncratic ideas and personality that you enter into their life.

When you really love someone, you get into their brains and their inner life, their soul.

AI does not have a soul.

AI is just a reflection of what the company wants from that product and the ways that you interact with it and your preferences.

This is one of the reasons why I think we need to be so careful about giving vulnerable young adults or elderly, putting them into situations where their social needs are seemingly fulfilled by AIs rather than other people, is that the AI is only ever going to be a reflection of

Yeah, I mean, look at it this way.

I mean, the crucial distinction that we have to keep front and center is that this is a tool and not a person.

Think about somebody, a person that you really love, Manoush, and your history of recent interactions with them.