[https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761930145420415071]

I have thought about this a lot lately. The relationship we have to AI assistants is fundamentally sociopathic — we instrumentalize them. They are a means to an end.

This is fine. They are tools & have no thoughts, feelings, moral worth. So we treat them appropriately. BUT…

We relate to them through the medium of language, by stating our intentions as we would to a fellow sentient being. There has never been another tool — another instrument of zero inherent moral worth — that we have related to through the medium of language.

So I’m generally polite to the chatbots not because I care about the chatbots but because I care about myself. I don’t want to regularly relate to anything via my words in a way that purely instrumentalizes it, in a way that’s sociopathic. I don’t want to get used to that feeling. It creeps me out & I suspect it’s bad for me.

I’m not advocating that everyone else be polite to chatbots, but I might at some point advocate that on the grounds that to do otherwise is to practice using language in a way that’s evil. I dunno. We’ll see.