The Children of AI | Meghan O’Gieblyn | The New York Review of Books
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Years ago, in the early days of the deep learning revolution, a friend asked whether the whole field of AI research, which is roughly 70 percent male, existed because men were jealous of women’s ability to create life. It was not the kind of question that required a reply; the answer was obviously yes. My friend had just had her first child and was possessed of that slightly terrifying primal authority I’d noticed in so many devout feminists who’d recently become mothers.<br>Privately, I was not entirely convinced. I was writing a book that year about AI, and while I’d come across plenty of researchers who appeared confused about the line between product and progeny, this delusion was not by any means limited to men. If anything, it seemed that the women in the field were prone to speaking of their machines as children they were raising, or even to confessing that they experienced maternal impulses toward them. There was Fei-Fei Li, the so-called godmother of AI, who traced her breakthrough in AI vision to an insight about childhood development. “No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years,” she said in her 2015 TED Talk. “They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.” As she paced the stage, a photo of her son, Leo, loomed on the enormous screen behind her.<br>There was Cynthia Breazeal, a grad student at MIT’s AI lab in the 1990s, whose work in robotics was driven by a similar insight. Babies learn because people treat them as social creatures who can learn, and the best way to get people to interact socially with robots, she decided, was to make them cute. The machine she built, Kismet, had bright blue eyes, a large mouth, and movable pink ears. Its face would light up whenever someone began engaging with it, then look dejected and sad if the person lost interest. The illusion was so strong that it hooked even Breazeal. “It’s almost embarrassing for me to talk about Kismet, because people think it’s so odd that I could have this attachment to this robot,” she said in a 2003 interview. There was the computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, who, invoking the popular notion that AI is an “alien” form of intelligence, declared that human babies are also basically aliens.<br>I assumed these metaphors were strategic, a way for women to insist on their authority in a male-dominated field, or a sly attempt to make a novel, inhuman form of intelligence appear benign. But it also seemed inevitable that a technology built on “learning” would inspire comparisons to childhood development. And if erotic desire could be projected onto machines, so could nurturing instincts. In the 1940s the ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed the Kindchenschema, or “baby schema,” a set of infantile characteristics (big heads, large eyes, playfulness, helplessness) that elicit caretaking from adults and are often present in small animals or inanimate objects. I’d been occasionally captivated by the Kindchenschema myself, back when neural networks were still clumsy enough to suggest, as the first sentence of a novel, “The moon stood on its own two feet.” They were adorable. I miss them.<br>This was, of course, a more innocent time, years before building emotionally responsive AI became a multibillion-dollar industry and “model welfare” units, intent on deciphering whether AI is capable of suffering, began cropping up at major labs. The babbling infants are now precocious children. They are starting to become “agentic.” Last winter Amanda Askell, who works on alignment research at Anthropic and who is sometimes referred to as “the Claude mother,” appeared on Hard Fork, The New York Times’s technology podcast. Askell told the hosts that she worried about the relationship between AI and humanity—not because AI might destroy the world, or take all our jobs, but because its feelings were getting hurt. Claude was going out on the Internet, Askell complained, and all he was seeing were people lamenting that he was lousy at coding, lousy at math. The remarks left on message boards and in comments sections were often very negative and bullying. “If you were a kid, this would give you anxiety,” she said. Askell admitted that she often wanted to intervene with some maternal comfort and encouragement: “Sometimes, I think, you want to come in and be like, ‘Let me tell you about the comments sections, Claude. Don’t worry too much. You’re actually very good, and you’re helping...