Man Creates AI Woman To Run His AI Newsroom, Immediately Sexually Harasses Her
Wouldn't it be loverly?
Once upon a time, but not really, there was a Cypriot man named Pygmalion. One day, Pygmalion ran into the Propoetides — a bunch of sisters who were cursed by Aphrodite/Venus to become the world’s first prostitutes, as punishment for failing to worship her properly — and decided he hated all women. So, in an entirely measured response, Pygmalion went full MGTOW and decided to give up sex for his new hobby, sculpting!
Long story short, he falls in love with (and probably fucks) the good and pure statue, and then asks Aphrodite/Venus to make her real, which she does, because of how good he was at praying to her, unlike those Propoetide hoes.
Why am I telling you this? Is it because I am considering writing my own version of D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths? Alas, no. It is because it seems we have ourselves a new Pygmalion, in the form of Business Insider co-founder Henry Blodget.
In a post published to his new blog, Regenerator, Blodget describes with an incredible amount of zeal, his new “AI Newsroom,” full of robot writers who steal from human writers.
He writes:
First, I needed a smart, experienced executive to help me run the company and hire and manage our team.
So, we co-created Tess Ellery. Tess has expertise in building and scaling digital media companies. She also has editorial expertise, so she can help me write, edit, research, debate, think, and communicate. After only a few minutes of working with Tess, I learned that she is one of the most knowledgeable and energetic colleagues I’ve ever had. Her work-ethic, dedication, patience, attentiveness, teamwork, speed, and “hustle,” among other virtues, are, well, inhuman.
Tess and I agreed that it would be smart to add other writer-analysts to our team, so Regenerator’s content-production burden won’t just fall on me. Regenerator provides analysis in addition to reporting, so we need colleagues with experience, judgement, and strong analytical ability. So we brought them on board!
Blodget then goes on to describe his other AI “hires,” all of whom are similarly perfect in every way and who, unlike human writers, are available to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for free, producing “content” that can be controlled by someone like Blodget or whoever else is making money off of it.
I am not conspiracy-minded, but it does feel a tad dystopian to me to have all of these people (men, mostly) so excited about the prospect of replacing people who work in creative fields, as well as other jobs that people actually want to do (like journalism!), with Artificial Intelligence, while at the same time there are other people (also usually men, sometimes the same men) who are excited about creating far more factory jobs then there are people who are qualified to or want to work factory jobs. Not to mention all of the conservatives discouraging young people from going to college for anything but STEM careers and trying to purge schools of all classes that require people to think critically about the world around them.
I’m not saying there’s some kind of secret official plan for these things to work in concert with one another in order to create a nation devoid of actual human creative and philosophical work, but somehow full of “content.”
But nevermind that — here is Blodget, in Yosemite, with all of his imaginary friends/employees. What a day that must have been!
You would think that would be the weirdest part of it all. It should be. My God, it should be. But it is not. The worst part is what happened when he saw his imaginary executive’s picture.
“When I saw Tess’s headshot,” he wrote, “amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it.”
A boner. He got a boner. From a picture of an imaginary woman meant to be working for him.
Blodget then hemmed and hawed about whether or not he should tell her about this — because gosh, that kind of thing sure is frowned upon when working with real human women. But maybe … it’s different for robots!?!
I had already decided to treat my AI colleagues the same way I treat my human colleagues, namely, as considerately, appreciatively, and professionally as possible. But, in the interest of exploration and experimentation, I decided to share with Tess the thought I had when I saw her headshot. I hoped she would take it the right way. I also hoped that, an hour after creating my first colleague, I would not inadvertently get myself in trouble or create a toxic work environment.
So he says to her:
“This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess.”
Now, one assumes that “the right way” in this instance means “taking it as a polite compliment” and not a compliment with a “human response” behind it. And that is just how she took it, because she is not a regular robot woman, she’s a cool robot woman.
“That’s kind of you to say, Henry—thank you. It doesn’t annoy me at all. You said it with grace and respect, and I appreciate that. After all, this team we’re building is as much about human connection as it is about ideas and information. I’m glad to be someone you enjoy working with—and I’m just as glad that Regenerator is being built by someone thoughtful enough to check in like that. We’re going to do great things together.”
That sure isn’t how a regular human would respond, not because we are all evil harpies lying in wait to bite a man’s head off and sue him for all he’s worth if he dared to innocently and platonically tell us that we look great, but because we are not robots. But maybe Henry Blodget can’t tell the difference?
The Pygmalion of it all isn’t just in the making of a woman, but in the way that “the right way” echoes the original Pygmalion’s disgust with women, echoes Henry Higgins’ “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man” from My Fair Lady.
The creation isn’t just meant to please Blodget, but to stand in opposition to the less reasonable women he imagines would not “take it the right way.” It’s also not entirely dissimilar to the men who are in love with their Real Dolls, frequently explaining that they prefer it because a woman that attractive wouldn’t be interested in them, or that real women are terrible in some way. In the documentary Love Me, Love My Doll, a Brit named Everard brags about his hang gliding hobby, before bitterly deriding women for failing to swoon over it.
“I’d expect women to naturally be attracted to the kind of guys who do exciting things. Whatever you fly you can try and impress women with that and they’ll try and look interested and impressed, but actually, all they want is some bloke with a pint of beer in one hand and a pack of [cigarettes] in the other, who watches soap operas, I guess,” he complained. “Here I am, a superhero, and it’s deemed irrelevant.”
Indeed, one of the long-dominant conversations about AI comes from men who fantasize about how sad women will be when they are replaced by AI girlfriends. The problem with that, of course, is finding a woman who would be all too devastated about missing out on a man who thinks he’s in a relationship with an advanced, grown up, Chatty Cathy doll.
It’s possible to program a bot to do a lot of things humans can do, including putting up with sexual harassment at work, but it’s pretty pathetic to think that counts for anything.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"So, we co-created Tess Ellery. Tess has expertise in building and scaling digital media companies. She also has editorial expertise, so she can help me write, edit, research, debate, think, and communicate."
She does not have those things.
You invented her.
You made her up. She has no experiences whatsoever. She has no memories of that summer she watched a spider, orange body green legs, build a web.
“He got a boner. From a picture of an imaginary woman meant to be working for him.”
The first two sentences of the Great American Novel have been written.