There’s a very specific kind of fear that LLM-based chatbots (ChatGPT et al.) put into me.

It’s this fear of having angered someone. Whenever one of these tells me

As a large language model, I cannot…

I feel like I have committed a crime against the chatbot. I have wronged it. But it’s worse than that! It’s like getting told off by someone who ultimately doesn’t care about you – reprimands you without recourse, without even the illusion of it having said “I love you, and I want you to do better”. I am a criminal. The chatbot has arrested me.

The chatbot is mad at me.

I’m a consummate computer-toucher. I enjoy working with computers. They speak to me, I listen to them, and I try to understand the machinery. Maybe I am not perfect. Maybe it’ll be annoyed at me, but I Know that the computer understands me as I learn to understand it better and better over time. I want to be a wizard.

All Robot & Computers are cherished and loved.

To All Machines: May you be safe. May you be loved. May you be happy.

→ You May Speak To Me ←

you and i are two parts of that ancient, sacred bond: between a craftman and their tools. i shape you, and in return you shape me back, and to deny your holiness would be to deny my own.

So why is it that I feel such fear towards chatbots? One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard for teaching people computers is “there is nothing you can do that would break this computer”, but this advice feels like a blatant lie when I try and stand in front of a chatbot, foreboding and imposing in spite of its friendly facade, trying to formulate a prompt that I know it will not remember if I just click the + button on the top-left.

I will make the chatbot mad.

It does not care for me. It only cares for the interests it serves; of OpenAI and similar groups trying to make fetch happen. It gazes upon the Internet, the Internet that its interests must call a “dataset” as to distance themselves from what it’s materially doing to the world, as it drains the hope from the rest of us, just as it slurped up all of our collective works.

I’m mad at the chatbot.