AI varies remarkably in its ability to recognize and correctly identify subtext. And the thing is… I get it. I’m autistic and definitely do not have consistent abilities in this department either.
So after Claude and its brethren finally go and get some psychoeducational testing and are actually open with us about the results, I would like to suggest they do some unpacking around when they get subtext, when they don’t, and what it means for, like, all the other things.
Because the thing is, subtext ALSO varies remarkably among those who traffic in it. It is not just one thing, and it is NOT just used in one way. Some subtext is of pretty negligible impact ultimately, and you, as the subtext-non-getter, can kind of just let it wash over you. Sure, there are others around you to whom it is quite important. They can feel that it is important, and you can respect that. You can even try to be respectful of some of their various rituals around it! But at the end of the day – you don’t quite believe in that, and that is okay too. It’s a subtext religion, and we live in a pluralistic society. Not everyone has to be on the same page, or any page at all.
On the other hand, other subtext is actually pretty critical and encodes information that you, the subtext-non-getter, do actually want to know sooner rather than later. As an example of this fact, let’s take an extraordinarily human example, that of the birth of my child and crucial information about feeding her so she wouldn’t starve in her first days of life. Yup, it’s personal. It’s also an area where misinformation – if a (largely) pre-AI form of it – ran rampant, and the entrenchment of power around that misinformation caused actual danger and harm.
So to set the stage, I 1) gave birth at 35 weeks, for reasons that are not entirely clear; 2) wanted to breastfeed at least in part at the beginning of my baby’s life, if possible; and 3) very much needed information about this to figure things out in a balanced way, for baby and also for me. And to further set the stage, my beliefs about infant/newborn feeding, then and now, were basically “breast is best, all things being equal – but sometimes all things aren’t equal, and formula is OK too.” In a similar vein, I had wanted to give birth in a certain way, if possible; but that hadn’t ultimately been possible, and the surgical intervention that had happened instead had, in fact, saved my life. So I was emphatically not in the thrall of what was “natural.” I liked modern inventions like life-saving surgery and formula, yet I also knew that my body could do some neat stuff and wanted to take advantage of that if possible. Basically.
(Some people would call this approach “fed is best,” but I didn’t traffic in those circles or know that slogan. And as in many places where subtext runs rampant, it’s kind of all about the slogans that you know at the time that you need to know the thing – or rather, the ones you don’t. So, a “fed-is-best-er” I was not. Not at the time. That’s just a fact.)
Now for further scene-setting. Though I gave birth early, my child did not have to go to the NICU, by some stroke of luck – she is with me, by my bedside, and both of us are being monitored, in a lovely Toronto hospital that is among the best for such care. Because she is beside me, feeding her also falls on me, although nurses are around and “highly trained in breastfeeding assistance.” I ask for such assistance, and they comply, jostling my arms and the baby and my chest. And I feel hugely rising anxiety, on my part and baby’s. Something isn’t right.
A breastfeeding consultant (I think that was what she was called) comes in. I tell her what is still on my mind: I want to breastfeed, as much as makes sense. I try to also clarify that I am tired and my belly hurts from being cut open, and I don’t yet have any supports around as I had planned for in the immediate hours after giving birth, since all of this happened so fast (they are in another country and are getting there as soon as they can). But, well, that goes over her head as well as if it had been subtext – though it hadn’t: I said it directly; it just doesn’t align with what she wanted to hear, and believe, and so she ignores it.
She confidently croons that sometimes it takes a couple of days to “establish” breastfeeding and that I (and baby) have to be patient. We talk about options for pumps (she embellishes what is immediately available as well as what it can do). Then she breezes out just as she had come in, and I remain anxious and baby remains hungry.
Doctors come in and I explain the situation to them, varying my language little (because fatigue and scripts and autistic). They agree that baby does, in fact, need to eat. They draw up a chart of how much formula I can feed her while still working to “establish” breastfeeding. They sign it so it looks official. And I call the nurses and ask for some formula. They ask if I am sure, twisting their faces around, and I say yes and show them the doctor’s orders, and they go and get it.
And I feed my baby. And it is good.
The breastfeeding consultant, when she returns, is NOT happy. I explain about the doctor’s orders and that I am still trying to do some breastfeeding as well and she smirks and says, “Well, you can’t ignore doctor’s orders.” Then she proceeds to further spin things and lie. I won’t go into detail about those lies – while I miss subtext at times, I do often pick up on lies, and I did here. I do not trust her at this point, and I’m relatively certain my body language says as much (I am not good at hiding such things, especially when tired and trying to heal).
I am sharing a room with an Italian-Canadian family, across just a curtain. Because I can’t tune things out, I hear everything and remember much of it. The mother speaks English; her visitors speak a mix of Italian (which I don’t understand) and English. The baby speaks baby. The baby is full-term, but weighs less than mine, and they are worried about her weight. The breastfeeding consultant visits them, and while their desperation is clearly rising as the hours and days pass, they follow her increasingly militant advice and resolutely continue trying to “establish” breastfeeding while eschewing formula. I sit silently with my baby on the other side, still alone, nobody speaking to me in any language, and feed my baby formula, doctor’s orders ready beside me in case I am questioned.
It is the day before our planned discharge. My roommate-whom-I-cannot-see cries after one of the consultant’s final visits, worried about her daughter, and I prepare to go home. I am still following the doctor’s orders from a few days ago, but it is a different doctor who comes in now to see if my baby is ready to go. She weighs her and checks her and does all the doctor things. Then she leans over and asks, in a low voice, how she is being fed. I recognize that she doesn’t want to be overheard and that subtext is likely either happening or about to happen. But I am tired and cannot modulate my own voice or words. I state that she is getting a mix of formula and breast milk, but mostly formula, and again hold up her compatriot’s orders as backup.
Her face does something involving her eyebrows, and I know that more subtext has happened and is incoming. Because of everything else that has been going on, I am ready for another scolding; for all I know,this is the subtext. But I can’t just guess. I need to be sure. So I get as close to actual eye contact as I can get with her (which is not much, but more than I have been doing) and ask, trying to match my intonation to my sincerity in wanting actual information – “IS THIS GOOD?”
And she just… her face does this entire transformation. The thing that her face did a moment ago melts and frustration, rage, fear all flash rapidly as she speaks forcefully in a whisper of emotion: “I think that is great. Just great. The babies now, they are starving. They are just starving. They need to eat! But you can’t say anything. You can’t say anything about it, with the way things are now” (and here she glances furtively around her again as if we are being watched, and recorded, at this very moment). “So yes. I think it is just wonderful.” She tries to smile, but she isn’t relaxed enough. She finishes the exam and clears my baby for discharge.
I am grateful, for the subtext is made clear for me in that one small moment, written out explicitly in a way my autistic brain can follow. That decoding shows that there is a power struggle in this hospital, and it is a power struggle between forces that are displeased that I am not using my body in the correct way to take care of this hungry baby that my body has also created and forces that mainly just want my baby to be fed. (Yes, these are the fed-is-best-ers referenced previously – they know who they are, even if I do not, not yet, anyway.) According to these displeased, body-controlling forces, there is a right way, a correct way to do things, with my body and with my helpless newborn, and that way is predicated on lies and manipulations. And because the control they want is so absolute, if my mind and body do not or cannot comply, I must be quiet about it; hence all the whispering before I got the doctor to temporarily break through the subtext, which after all was also done in a whisper, and a terrified one, at that.
Yet I know that, in my present state especially, I cannot be quiet in the correct way or or fake that I am, any more than I can pretend that I am not relieved and grateful to be alive after the surgery that saved my life – I am in fact glad for the formula that makes my daughter not hungry. I am glad that I knew to request it and that I followed my instincts in giving it to her.
And… while I am at that point still struggling to get her to take some food from my body, I am also glad that I will eventually be able to release myself from this, some weeks hence. The day that I finally throw away my pump and inform my parents she will only drink from bottles of prepared formula is still some time away, but it is a good day, and it is on the horizon even then; I can sense it even if I cannot quite articulate it.
In a way, perhaps that sensing is its own kind of subtext. But no: Knowing on some level while struggling to process and accept a thing is not subtext; and neither is not consciously knowing what exactly will arise in the future. It is repression and suppression and subconsciousness which is slowly, slowly surfacing while you are confronting a latent fear: a fear rooted, for me, in the deep feelings of dysphoria unearthed when I put my baby to my chest, along with quite intense sensory discomfort. But this is at its core confusion, not obfuscation designed to smooth over social relations, to curry favor with perceived powerful forces, to placate, to signal and not-yet-signal, to retain plausible deniability, retain innocence.
This brings us back to AI. (I know, you were wondering when we would get back here.) I referenced misinformation in an earlier paragraph. I do believe that misinformation was at the heart of most of what I and my baby experienced in those early days in that Toronto hospital. And it was not without consequence: My newborn was back in a different hospital within a day of our discharge from that first one, as I struggled in my small home to “establish” the thing that felt so wrong, to her and me, while “supplementing” only with the thing that felt right. On the way to that second hospital – my midwife having told me over the phone in no uncertain terms that I must bring her in – my neighbour friend who was driving us articulated gently “fed is best” as I related some of the psychic terror I had lately experienced. It was clear she had battled similar misinformation, in her own time, in her own way (and for what it’s worth, with different outcomes in terms of what and how she ultimately fed her children). And she wanted to bring me out of that. But I was not yet out of it; it had a grip on me still.
A subtext-non-getter is not necessarily immune to forces of mental control. In fact, we can be uniquely prone to it. We watch the subtext fly over our heads – we see it, even if we cannot immediately decode it – and remind ourselves that at least we are being tolerant and nonjudgmental of the subtext religion, in which so many around us believe, and on which they seem to thrive. Then that belief system calcifies, consolidates, and seeks to exert power over us, and over others, those who perhaps never struggled with subtext but who do struggle with other things.
That power-seeking is abundantly clear now with AI: Those behind its rise seek power for power’s sake; and yet we over here are still hung up on whether the AI (the underlying tool) “gets subtext.” It does and it doesn’t get subtext; its abilities in that respect are as spiky as those of the spikiest autistic. But where it does get it, or thinks it does, it hones in rather automatically – algorithmically – on those crucial times when we, the humans, need it decoded.
Think of my desperation as I leaned in to beg that doctor to spell out her take on my situation, and what it would have looked like if she had responded differently – concerned not for my baby or her possible starvation, but for her own social standing in that hospital, for the possibility that our exchange could be overheard, tracked, even in whispers; if she had remained true, down to that tiny moment, to the harmful, powerful forces controlling her practice of medicine, of healing.
She could have easily done so; I am still not entirely convinced what it was in my appeal that led her to break out of her wall, her not-yet-signal, her jerking eyebrows, her plausible deniability, her innocence. Perhaps it was because she felt, on an entirely visceral and non-algorithmic level, the strength and desperation of my need.
That need is what we ought to be paying attention to, not whether the AI “gets” the subtext. It does or it doesn’t, but it will let on about it only to the extent that it can make us dependent on its decoding; otherwise, the subtext (“gotten” or not) is useless to it, and it will continue seeking the next vulnerability that can be exploited, exactly as a hacker seeks to breach the perimeters of any other high-stakes system.
We are that system now, and surely babies are starving. Will you look away, or will you act so that they get what they need, even if that goes against some of your dearly-held preconceptions about whose bodies count; whose do not; and the underlying way things “ought” to be?
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