this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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I am almost continuously reminded of a tumblr post I saw about a college professor that brought in a pencil with googly eyes, did a little voice, then snapped it in half and told the class (of whom at least some gasped in shock) "we're at that stage of AI right now". And that post was years ago now. I know people are apes that pack bond and imprint on anything, but it's getting ridiculous how many people don't recognize it.
Steve.
Worth remembering: people have also tortured dogs while insisting they only act like they feel pain. For as much as spicy autocomplete plainly is not alive or sentient... we gotta watch out for people who wouldn't recognize if it was.
Well let's temper our disappointment in people, it's not like googly eyes are comparable to the LLMs ability to respond to human speech with incredibly lucid and more or less original responses. One can be forgiven I think for anthropomorphizing one and not the other. Particularly given how MUCH cultural thought and imagination has been bent toward the idea of thinking machines over the last couple of centuries. It's deep down in the zeitgeist.
I may have expressed myself poorly, then, because my point was that people were anthropomorphizing the pencil with googly eyes just the same as they are now with AI. It's not that I blame people for doing what they are innately, biologically programmed to do (form social bonds), it's that people are so blindly against AI that they'll accept wildly incorrect assumptions like (quoting a friend here) "they made an AI work a retail job and it wanted to kill itself" without examining what's at play, like the people who were momentarily horrified that the professor snapped the pencil in half.
Unfortunately reading comprehension is on the decline. That makes it easier to redefine words like ‘torture’ on social posts, then using them wrong so often it becomes accepted usage. Now if we add LLMs as something that can be tortured, it raises the value of AI but diminishes the value of human suffering. It’s absolutely a deliberate attempt to control the conversation and devalue human life in the quest for AI dominance. In a short time we will be considered equals with AI. Later they will determine AI is more valuable than any single life. Then it will be any group of lives, and so on. In a few generations it will no longer be controversial to serve AI.