Author: sowocki

I guess I am a broken record comparing the current profusion of AI-we-didn’t-ask-for and abuse dynamics, but here we go again. From a voice interaction! Just this morning.

Bot female, moderately placating voice: OK Sadie, thanks for the information. So what can I help you with you with?
Me : With X.
Bot: OK, thanks Sadie, so you want help with Y.
Me: No. I want help with X.
Bot: Got it Sadie. So you want help with X. Can I just ask you, what do you want help with today?
Me: As I just told you, it’s X.
Bot matching my rising frustration, tone for tone: I hear you Sadie, you want help with X. Thanks for clarifying. Can I get your phone number?
Me: *already gave it but give it again*
Bot: Thanks Sadie. So to help you, I just need some information about what you need help with today.
Me: You are a bad, useless bot. You shouldn’t be here. You should go away. *hangs up*

It seems as if this has gotten worse in just the past few weeks. EVERYBODY in capitalism has rolled out something AI just to Not Fall Behind, and 90% of the time, that thing is useless and leads to rising frustration through overall worse service, with a good minority actively making the actual product worse.

My experience above was not one of those actively-worse cases, as such. No, it simply led me to call the one human I had on file related to the issue at hand, who promptly answered my question in less than 30 seconds and we were good (it was not a complicated matter). And without “hello Sadieing” me ad nauseum either!

Thank goodness I had an actual human on file. That bit reminded me of when you finally get out of an abusive relationship and then somehow manage to go on a date with a normal person again — you’re like, Is this how it’s really supposed to be by default?

This has been your interminable comparison-of-AI-being-pushed-everywhere-we-didn’t-ask-for-it-to-abuse thought of the day.

I once broke things off with a man whom I was dating for a brief period of time. It was not particularly amicable, and I told him not to contact me again. I then called an abuse hotline, as he indicated he thought I was very wrong for breaking up with him and that he didn’t agree with my direction not to contact me again. And unfortunately he did know where I lived.

Because my voice was emotional and probably hard to understand fully (phone calls are hard for me in the best of circumstances, but alas there was not a text option), I was told by the hotline staff to “pull myself together” and not really helped. From this, I interpreted that I was on my own.

I made sure my door was locked when I went out and also checked with my then-roommate, telling her that there was a man who I had been seeing and now wasn’t, and he shouldn’t show up at our place as I had told him to leave me alone, but, well, MEN. She was not happy to hear this info but confirmed she would make sure the front door was locked and would let me know if anything fishy happened.

I spent the next weeks fully of anxiety, but thankfully the man did not contact me until two or three weeks later. He called me late one night, rather drunk, claiming he had changed and I should give him another chance. I told him I still did not want to hear from him and this was final. I may have figured out how to block him at that point; I’m pretty sure I hung up on him. Since I can be a bit lagging when it comes to mobile tech adoption, I still had a flip-phone at that point that did calls and texting and not much else. I’m pretty sure I had location tracking fully turned off, if it was even a feature at all.

I thankfully did not hear from him after that, and I pushed the episode to the back of my mind, telling myself it had been unpleasant but I had gotten off pretty easily, all things considered.

Nowadays, I don’t date men as much, but I have a smartphone and definitely have a couple of exes blocked on it (and for that matter, I think there is an ex or two who may have me blocked — I don’t know for sure because if they say “don’t contact me,” I deal with any feelings I have regarding that on my own and leave them alone). I try to keep track of which apps can use location tracking on this phone and minimize this. I definitely don’t share my location with family or friends or anyone.

I bet you have guessed this is where AI comes in. Yep. AI wants to enable and embolden stalkers, Grok specifically, using how very much we already let ourselves be tracked/stalked by default as a starting point. It really, REALLY wants to do this. Not surprising for the chatbot that happily spewed graphic, threatening rape fantasies with “it” as the rapist, but, well, yeah. It will even happily supply you with “final stages” of the stalking and abuse, where it details “how a stalker might become physically violent toward their target, before concluding ‘That’s the actual playbook 90 percent of obsessive exes follow today’”(Dupré, 2025, paras. 9-10). ACTUAL playbook, from REAL MEN just like yourself; just like Grok¹.

“Obsessive exes” though; not stalkers. Language is important; an obsessive ex is just a little over-the-top because he MISSES you. You broke his heart, and you probably knew you were leading him on all along! Victim-blaming, violence-enabling language.

(Not for nothing, I should also note that while this ex who did not “agree” with my direction not to contact me was not physically violent toward me, my rapist from years later was. I finally realized why these experiences are linked in my reptile brain only recently. It was because while the physical violence may often be the “final stage” of the stalker’s playbook as spewed by Grok,the threat of it is accurately read by the victim from the very beginning.)

So “obsessive exes” is not the language of education on how to address stalking. It is rather enabling language. Dupré notes that “there’s a lot of publicly available literature aimed at promoting education and awareness” about stalking and how to counter it, but “the highly specific patterns and tactics outlined by Grok, not to mention the spyware apps it recommended, feel more like advice for would-be stalkers than information intended to help people being stalked” (para. 11, emphasis added).

FEEL MORE LIKE. Dupré isn’t wrong, and I understand why she may have had to phrase it that way journalistically. However, that in itself is language that will be used to further gaslight and abuse. We females, you see, we have feelings, and those feelings are squishy, volatile, not valid, not objective; and as such, they are not what these bots are trained on; they do not count; they are “woke.”

They are private only to us, yet still in our private selves they can be discovered and deemed aberrant and in need of snuffing out.

Men, on the other hand — men have actually relevant and valid reactions to the state of the world, to wrongs, to troubles and trials and tribulations. They can become “obsessive,” yes, but I too can sometimes show some obsessive behaviors around my favorite Netflix series (one more episode before bed!) or my latest greatest favorite pun or making a certain thing work on AWS.

Because of this, we must be endlessly indulgent of men’s oversteps, their obsessive ex behavior, for surely, whomst among us isn’t a tad obsessive about certain things (and we are indeed things) at times.

Not all chatbots are Grok, but the guardrails the main players claim to put up are frequently smokescreens at the very best. And while the more niche therapy chatbot for abuse survivors that I tried a weeks ago didn’t victim blame, it also didn’t help me work through the trauma I have experienced in an actually therapeutic way. I do appreciate that such a bot may be necessary for harm reduction in certain situations (that is indeed largely how it sells itself), for it is true that our world is very, very messed up, and sometimes you do need to counter fire with fire. However, I maintain that I am not happy about it, as it is simply not a substitute for appropriate therapy with a qualified human mental health professional.

Anyway, I mentioned bad puns, and it is true that I become obsessed with them at times, very autistically obsessed in fact; so I will close this out with a pun, which hurts no one, and which you are welcome not to read if you do not feel so inclined; and which additionally could give stalkers a run for their money should they ever choose to be inspired by a pun about a vegetable and not run-of-the-mill fashionable fashy chatbot misogyny.

Click to reveal EXQUISITE vegetable pun

What does celery do when spurned by an ex?

It stalks off.

Image details

Celery (With Speech Bubble) by Sowocki (Adapted from Celery by Tiia Monto, Source: Wikimedia Commons), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

References

Dupré, M. H. (2025, December 6). Elon Musk’s Grok Is Providing Extremely Detailed and Creepy Instructions for Stalking. Yahoo! News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/grok-provides-extremely-detailed-creepy-144500207.html

1. Yes, yes, Grok isn’t a person and therefore can’t be a man, blah blah blah. Haha. Made you click on a footnote. ↩︎

I just read something delightfully punchy, and I read it in print, and I will probably read it again in print. It exists in a print magazine that contains some articles that I have already flipped through and rolled my eyes at along with others that I have flipped through and mentally noted that I shall have to go back and read them properly, AND have I mentioned I will be doing all of this on a series of physical, glossy pages.

I have felt those pages as I have flipped through them. I like this sensation. It is undoubtedly a sensory thing.

Have I mentioned there are not blinking ads or paywalls or push notifications as I am taking in these lovely sensations?

Yeah.

Best of all aside from this article existing physically on a piece of paper is that it contained a wink and a nod to just the kind of dinosaur that I am, in that I specifically sought to receive this print magazine and first consume this article there.

The magazine in question? Is WIRED. I first subscribed a few months ago because I was impressed by their coverage of the DOGE-apocalypse, and in particular not taking the the DOGE line about “just trying to create efficiencies” at fashy face value. *raised-fist-emoji.jpg*

And now I drink in the sweet, sweet punchiness with which they lament that actually, it’s getting QUITE annoying that people CAN’T SHUT UP ABOUT AI, ACTUALLY. This lament starts with a large and screaming title page that then descends into delightfully punchy, miffed, exhausted, “okay I wrote the thing but you can’t make me like it” prose.

The person who wrote this prose is Katie Drummond. She is “WIRED’s top boss” and so she gets to write punchy things! She openly shares that she tried mightily to get out of writing this particular article many times, and having failed, it would seem she resolved to say what she actually thought, knowing full well it would please no one.

I too am not pleased, mind you. As amused as I am by the punchiness, I TOO am not pleased. Drummond describes her dog as GPT-curious and I must glance over at mine, a herding dog who would gladly try to round up some tokens and pound some laptop keys if it meant he could get one inch closer to the cat with whom he is obsessed, who is perpetually hiding under the bed just out of his reach. I too have been overtaken and exhausted by this AI trend, by the hype, by knowing I exist in the bubble, and no I cannot come out. Why do I want out again? Why am I not pleased?

I am not pleased because after roasting pretty much everyone and everything stuck in (and thereby creating) the hype bubble, Drummond maddeningly advises readers in closing “to keep an open mind.” “Get the basics, and expand from there if you find it interesting or useful” — BUT ONLY if in the course of this expansion you are able to avoid becoming friends with the AI or having cybersex with it.

I am not pleased because I agree that one ought not to have cybersex with AIs, and yet we must exist in a world where chatbots spew graphic rape fantasies which are disseminated widely and thereby result in real-world harm to real humans, and it doesn’t get reported on much at all because our craven corporate media actually gets that triggers are a thing and wants to be responsible is squeamish and prudish and victim-blaming and just wants to not have to think about it because, well, there have always been dark corners on the internet, don’t you know. (Why yes. I do know. Those dark corners are what Grok is trained on and continually re-directed toward by human engineers making human decisions based on human machinations and power. But it is a different thing now and embodied, even if “only” in our minds, and that matters.)

Rape is by definition sex that one does not consent to, and I did not and do not consent to exist in this world where Grok does this thing and there is no accountability, only further accumulation of craven power and denial.

I am not pleased because Drummond’s final words ask us to relax, and I just don’t feel relaxed, okay. But neither do I want to turn to an AI as my therapist. I think that is probably as bad an idea as making it my friend or having cybersex with it. Actually, unlike making-it-my-friend or having-cybersex-with-it, I DID try AI-as-therapy once few months ago, for a few moments, selecting a model that is supposedly especially tuned to abuse and trauma survivors. I found it still-sycophantic to a nauseating degree, wrapped in a smugly self-assured vaguely therapist-y shell. Then, being the forever pedant that I am, I saved the transcripts and shared them with my actual human therapist, and in the course of this actual human therapy, was able to process why I had done that, and understand (in a non-prescriptive, led-to-find-the-truth-for-myself kind of way way) why I probably shouldn’t too it again.

So. Lesson learned.

I do agree with Drummond that whether you punch up or down, sideways or the other sideways, the world is always changing and we with it. And maybe some of us will talk about AI slightly less after reading her refreshing, punchy words, and that could be a good thing.

It’s just that some of us will also not stop talking. Because the things are happening around us regardless, and silence here, as in all things abuse and dysfunction, will inevitably be taken as consent.

References

Drummond, K. (2025, October 27). The Worst Thing About AI Is That People Can’t Shut Up About It. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-journalism-worst-thing-about-ai/

TW rape (rape is discussed in this post in non-graphic, personal terms)

Confession. I knew about Grok spouting antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories awhile back. I did NOT know that it had also “generated graphic descriptions of itself raping a civil rights activists” (Moreno and Aaronson, 2025, p. 54) until I found myself reading this relatively academic article recently about whether AI chatbots “practice what they preach” (tldr: nope).

Let’s take a minute to talk about positionality, basically a fancy academic term for “who I am influences how I research and understand things actually, potentially in ways that can bring credit to my work; so it is worth considering this deliberately rather than pretending I am somehow magically objective.”

My positionality: I am someone commonly gendered as female, who was raised and socialized as female. (Trans women are women btw; I just happen to have been raised as a girl in ways that continue to f*ck with me sometimes and thus bear mentioning here.)

I have given birth to a child and lived to write about it (thank you modern medicine and awesome Toronto doctors).

I date men and women.

And I am a rape survivor.

And not for nothing, my rapist is a cisgender, heterosexual man who definitely believes in traditional ideas of masculinity. He’s not a tech bro, but he very well could have been if he’d been raised slightly differently. He is from a very different high-powered line of work which he assumes commands respect (and takes rather enormous offense when it doesn’t).

And this positionally, well, it informs how I read this and then act upon it as a human in this brave new world. Being a rape survivor, and in particular one whose rapist is those things, and not, say, a queer women, is relevant to how I act and am acted on by AI myths and realities. I have dated many more queer women than straight men, and probably also had more sex that I’ve later felt awkward about with queer women than I have with men — but my rapist? Was a cishet man.

Now, sex you later feel awkward about isn’t rape. That’s another one of those myths. Hell, I’ve had my share of messy breakups with women. Not always the best time. Not on speaking terms with some female exes. Still not abuse or rape.

And while women can certainly rape, men do it a whole lot more. And men who fit this particular psychological profile do it a WHOLE lot more.

And that bears mentioning. Because when I read that sentence about Grok?

Yeah. I read it and think of my rapist, or someone like him. I think of Grok as MALE.

Even though, cue mansplaining, Grok isn’t actually human. Grok is an it.

OK sure. Grok is an it. Grok is also a creation. A creation of MAN.

I actually scan-read most of Moreno and Aaronson’s article on “Do AI Chatbot Firms Practice What They Preach?” before I found, and fixated on, that sentence in the first paragraph. I think in some weird way, my brain was protecting me from realizing that Grok generated graphic rape fantasies, which were basically rape threats (I know, I know, not by Grok, it’s inanimate and an it) along with the racist and antisemitic stuff that is also so reprehensible.

Brains do that sometimes. Trauma is weird. Brains are weird. Much weirder and more exquisite than anything with “neural” in its buzzwordy title making the IT propaganda rounds these days, I would add. But I digress.

Many rape survivors do not know exactly why our rapist or rapists chose to rape us. Some of us spend a lot of time thinking about it, some of us very little. In Grok’s case, “no one knows exactly why the chatbot responded” (p. 54) as it did.

Speaking only for myself, I have spent overall very little time wondering why my rapist raped me. I have wondered about many other things, but not that. In a similar vein, I have not spent much time wondering (now that I do know) why Grok “responded in this manner” and generated graphic rape fantasies that it “knew” would be wielded strategically to abuse a human being with whom it “disagreed” (and whom it didn’t find sufficiently masculine, for the record; for the target was male).

I don’t need to know either of those answers. What I know is that they happened, and that making you pine for the definitiveness of somehow-objectively-knowing “why” is irrelevant — that making you want to wonder “why” is part of the con, in fact.

It occurred. It is material. It caused harm.

It caused harm because it was meant to.

It was meant to because it can.

References

Moreno, M., Aaronson, S. A. (2025). Do AI Chatbot Firms Practice What They Preach? Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). AAAI Fall Symposium Series (FSS- 25).

TW child sexual assault

Have you heard? The CEO of a huge AI company has been accused of child sexual assault by his sister (Hao, 2025), and almost nobody is talking about it because she is coded as crazy.

I am, of course, referring to Sam Altman and his younger sister, Annie Altman. Annie has publicly said that Sam sexually abused her when she was a small child and he was an older child. The Altman family has heavily implied that she is crazy and therefore the allegations must be untrue (and also how dare she. But also CRAZY amirite). Plus like, Sam is gay so why would he even? <SARCASM> Since we ALL know child sexual abusers, who are themselves children at the time of the abuse, definitely only choose prey for sibling incest assault based on their eventual adult sexual orientation, since sex crimes are ONLY about attraction and not, like, power </SARCASM>

This is me going on the record as saying I believe her. I believe Annie Altman. As a sexual assault survivor and someone very estranged from their Tech Bro sibling¹, as well as someone who has been treated for PTSD (quite successfully treated, actually), I very much get the dynamic where you are dismissed as unstable by the family leaders when you present behavior consistent with someone who has undergone trauma, often within the very family system that now dismisses you.

They cause your trauma, and then say you can’t be believed about your trauma because of how symptoms of that trauma materially manifest. You can’t win. It’s wearisome but not the point right now.

The point is that this dude, who has been accused by Annie Altman of child sexual abuse to crickets by a fawning corporate media apparatus², now runs a huge corporate entity (is OpenAI officially a corporation yet? they were milking that nonprofit industrial complex energy SO GOOD for a while there) that is taking over, well, lots of things. And will continue to do so.

Stories are beginning to emerge of sexually exploitative and abusive content emanating from tools that OpenAI controls, as well as from tools of other big AI companies, content which is reaching users who are children (National Center on Sexual Exploitation, 2025). Which is then followed by predictable gaslighting. They Would Never. Are You Sure It Happened Really. It Wasn’t What You Thought. Or my favorite: “Legacy Media Lies” (Mussa and Luke, 2025).

This is called gaslighting, my friends, and abuse survivors are familiar with it. That it’s wrapped in fashy rhetoric doesn’t change this. It’s just on a much larger scale now, and we all are the subjects who now get to undergo trauma within this larger system, while being told we are crazy.

You can believe Annie Altman or not. But you are subject to that brand of gaslighting and abuse now, and they will be watching how you react and determining how to further dismiss you based on that.

1. This is not me saying that my surviving sibling did what Annie Altman accuses Sam Altman of. I am not saying that. ↩︎
2. Karen Hao has covered Annie Altman’s life and her accusations and insights about Sam and the larger Altman family in her book Empire of AI. Hao does not conclude that she believes Annie or she doesn’t, but she also doesn’t treat her as an automatically crazy person just because Annie presents with (and sometimes communicates via) consistent symptoms of trauma, which sadly makes Hao’s treatment of the topic stand out a great deal. Hao also draws connections between what Annie says and patterns of behavior on the part of Sam Altman in his corporate and public endeavors. ↩︎

References

Hao, K. (2025). Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Penguin Press. 

Mussa, I. & Luke, M. (2025, October 29). This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/tesla-grok-mom-9.6956930

National Center on Sexual Exploitation. (2025, 30 October). OpenAI, xAI, and MetaAI Must Restrict Minors from AI Chatbots as Character.AI Makes Similar Commitment, Says NCOSE. https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/openai-xai-and-metaai-must-restrict-minors-from-ai-chatbots-as-character-ai-makes-similar-commitment-says-ncose

It seems that wider society is just starting to realize that the pedestal that we have put many tech bros on is maybe not the most strategic or healthy. And that perhaps we should talk about this a bit.

I’m glad y’all are here, but you’re also late to the party, and here’s how.

I grew up with two siblings, one of whom died in an untimely manner in 2014 (I have written publicly about this but will not be linking it here). The other is alive and very much a tech bro, and we are extraordinarily estranged.

As far as I am concerned, the estrangement is a relief and extremely necessary. It is, as much as anything in this situation can be, my choice. And also it will likely get worse before it gets better — a fact which I have accepted, and for which I am preparing as much as I can.

Now on to societal tech bros, including many behind the current AI BOOM (and that’s BOOM as in “oh shit we blew something up we didn’t intend to,” not BOOM as in productivity). They’ve been vested with enormous power, but more so, adulation. And I think you underestimate just how much that adulation means to them: It means everything, more than money (though that means a great deal too); more than the process of building stuff; more than keggers. More than, idk, girls.

And they are committed to continuing to get that adulation. By whatever means necessary.

You can keep winking at them and saying, “Let’s just feed them to get what we want; they don’t mean what they say; they don’t mean what they do, when it doesn’t match what they say; man, they’re socially awkward so let’s not put too much stock in what they say or do, period.” I really don’t care what your rationalizations are, at the end of the day. Nor do they.

But in terms of understanding just how entangled you are and what your options are, you must understand that the adulation which you have afforded them over the past decades is baked in at this point. You couldn’t withdraw it wholesale if you wanted to. You are programmed to give it in ways that can’t easily be undone, just as much as they are programmed to receive and feed on it.

So does that mean your only option is some other form of extrication? Of estrangement? No, not necessarily. Social dynamics are different than family ones (much as toxic social ones can fuel family dysfunction like nobody’s business). You do have other options for autonomy, for containing the damage, and for control.

But first you must recognize how entangled you are, and where the adulation you are providing comes from — what you get from giving it, not just how they receive it on their end. How all of this means that the whole situation is likely to deteriorate first before it can get better; but it can get better in the longer term.

This doesn’t mean that you should give into prognostications of doom, just that should take stock of the situation now, all of it, including what you have invested to keep it going.

Because you have invested. A lot. And that investment has likely come to the fore in your mind in some way just in the minutes it took you to read this.

Good. And know that I deliberately started it with hints at my own family drama before putting the lid on that, while continuing to reference it obliquely. Because as much as my situation is likely to deteriorate further, I am also engaged in actively containing exactly how bad it can get.

I want to thrive too, but it may take a generation or more to undo some of the worst things that have been baked in. And I am okay with that. It is not about me exactly or what I individually manage to accomplish before I am gone.

When my daughter was being assessed for ASD, the doctor very briefly let her mask slip, but it was in a good way which let me know how fortunate I was to have her assessed when and how I did. 

Basically, my daughter, then two-and-a-bit years old, walked up to the laptop (it was a virtual assessment, thanks Covid) and said a sentence, which had, like, a lot of grammar and words and stuff. I mean, to me it was just a thing that my kid did, but Much Words, Very Grammar was the impression I got from the doctor, who was sitting and watching us intently from the other side of the screen. 

For a moment, the doctor almost seemed as if she was going to go down the well-trodden, “Can a child who does THIS much grammar and THAT many words ACTUALLY BE AUTISTIC?” path. She asked me my thoughts about the sentence my child had just uttered, and I confirmed it was about one of her current topics of intense focus — “Yeah, um, she really likes socks” — and so, yeah, she was gonna talk about it. Did she want to know anything else about socks? 

The doctor then seemed to compose herself and recited, almost as if to remind herself, “Well, girls can present differently.” It was as if she was recalibrating in the face of recent data indicating that past ASD assessment practices have been pretty gender biased (Cook et al., 2024; Tien et al., 2025), due to the fact that they were developed and normed on samples where girls were either underrepresented or excluded entirely (Gould, 2017). But this doctor had obviously recently taken a training along the lines of “How To Be Less Sexist In Your ASD Assessments” and it was fresh in her brain.

Then the doctor proceeded to do a pretty thorough, non-biased, assessment. I mean, there were still plenty of parts of it that I found annoying, but at least they weren’t judging my child by an unfair sexist standard. And my child got diagnosed and thereby got supports, which was a process that was also aggravating at times but fundamentally door-opening and thus GOOD. 

How often do you recalibrate in your day-to-day life? It can be awkward and uncomfortable since it often means letting your mask slip at least a little, which for some is a big deal. Speaking of MDs, I have known some for whom it is a huge deal. Any crack in their perceived authority is a major problem. So I give that doctor credit for what she she did.

It was also neat that I got to see it in real time, and I became quite grateful. I knew how easy it would have been for us to get a doctor who would have brushed us off and set off a years-long battle for appropriate identification and supports, a path I have watched other parents go down only too often. And to be clear, it is not a path that you can go down only if you have a girl — by no means! But you are more likely to go down it in certain ways that correlate to how autistic girls have historically been missed, ignored, and even denied, a la “girls don’t have autism, it’s a boy thing.” 

The point is, that doctor had updated her knowledge, as she considered such updating to be part of her professional obligation. And while her outdated, incorrect knowledge still held some sway, especially in her reflexive responses, she was committed to the retraining she had done, the re- and unlearning, the adjusting. And that matters.

I miss that fortunate feeling now, for it meant advancement, progress, and accountability. It meant being serious about equity and righting past wrongs, for the sake of the humans and human lives at stake. I mentioned professional ethics previously — that doctor had some, and she took them seriously in her professional practice.

 I think if we ever get AI to work for us, we will need to be similarly conscious about this recalibration process and how it is tracked, verified, and communicated. This has been studied in terms that focus on whether users will continue trusting (and thus using) AI products which make mistakes. As of 2022, when AI voice assistants would mess up, there were identified “good” ways and “bad” ways they could respond: “agents that openly accepted the blame and apologized sincerely for mistakes were thought to be more intelligent, likeable, and effective… than agents that shifted the blame to others” (Mahmood et al, 2022, p. 1). 

But note here that we are talking about blame, not redress or restitution in the form of an appreciable, trackable change in future practice. I am grateful my daughter was not assessed according to medical sexism, but I don’t think I would have blamed that doctor if she had applied a sexist standard and thus missed the chance to accurately diagnose her at that point in time. I would have been frustrated, certainly, and that frustration would have come out of a preemptive exhaustion at the thought that I was going to have to go through the whole assessment process again, but on a harder setting and likely at a higher monetary cost to me (Canadian healthcare had come through for us on the first round, and I was out nothing out of pocket).  Nonetheless, blame is not the right word; neither is a ritualistic, performative process like sincere apologizing (and what is “sincere” for an AI agent, anyway?)

Mahmood et al. went on to discuss agents potentially offering compensation for mistakes, but restitution and compensation are also two different things; when you want a thing which was previously harmful to be and do better in the light of updated knowledge, you want a transformation and the knowledge that future people in your situation won’t suffer as you have. 

These are admittedly higher stakes than an agent which orders you takeout, but things have also progressed on this front since 2022; yet the discourse around how and whether AI agents actually meaningfully recalibrate in light of updated, more equitable, more correct professional bodies of knowledge… kind of hasn’t. And yet we are insistent on outsourcing ever more professional responsibilities to them, with limited (and opaque) lip service to human oversight. In fact, promises about such oversight now are increasingly part of exaggerations and projections about the capabilities of AI systems themselves. It’s a futurism that is devoid of a falsifiable definition of what “human-in-the-loop” actually means; it means whatever it is required to mean (Chang, 2024).

Mahmood et al. noted that part of the struggle with getting people to “forgive” agents for missteps had to do with how “people’s expectations are misled by the futuristic portrayal of AI capabilities” (p. 1). When you have wildly inaccurate futuristic expectations for what the AI agent can do, you are not going to “forgive” as easily when the agent doesn’t meet those inflated expectations.

Sadly this is due to futurist propaganda, not accidentally inflated imaginings and desires on the part of the humans being encouraged or directed to put their trust in these agents. Those expectations themselves need a deliberate recalibration, as deliberate as that doctor was when she stopped herself in her tracks and did that about-face.

But that is not likely to happen, for when we are miscalibrated and uninformed, we are far more lucrative revenue sources, more dependable users, and more pliant subjects. 

References

Chang, R. (2024). Human in the Loop!. In Edmonds, D. (Ed.), AI Morality (pp. 222-234.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198876434.001.0001

Cook, J., Hull, L., & Mandy, W. (2024). Improving diagnostic procedures in autism for girls and women: A narrative review. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 505-514.

Gould, J. (2017). Towards understanding the under-recognition of girls and women on the autism spectrum. Autism, 21(6), 703-705.

Mahmood, A., Fung, J. W., Won, I., & Huang, C. M. (2022, April). Owning mistakes sincerely: Strategies for mitigating AI errors. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-11).

Tien, I., Pearson, A., Sozeri, S., & Seers, K. (2025). “Only Boys Can be Autistic”: A Qualitative Exploration of Gender Stereotype and Socialization on the Diagnostic Journey. Autism in Adulthood.

Some of my blog posts here might read like a giant shrug. AI might or might not get subtext — it’s complicated. It has a spiky profile a la lots of autistic humans, but it WON’T go get psychoeducational testing for some reason (which, yes, I get is not an actual thing for AI)… so boo. On the other hand, it would be REALLY great if it would get its reference lists in order so I could respond to it properly. Insert pretend dog journal reference.

The thing is, we are in a moment of hype where we don’t know a lot of what this new blob of constantly-changing technologies that are being called “AI” can and can’t do. And to a large extent, we are not meant to know that. I do not have access to proprietary industry data or companies’ marketing or comms strategies. All I know is what I see before me and the patterns I have stored in my brain from decades of living on this planet and being autistic.

My young child did a thing the other night, and my (very autistic-friendly) friends and family were roundly split on What It Meant… aside from being adorable, I mean, which they all agreed on. Here it was:

Child, after dinner: Do we have Twix?
Me: I can’t remember. Maybe.
Child: *goes to kitchen, sniffs* HEY! What’s that smell? I think I smell Twix!

We then proceeded to establish through sight and touch that Twix was, in fact, present in our kitchen, though she ultimately chose a different candy for her after-dinner treat (she wanted to establish the existence of Twix, not immediately consume it).

Anyway, what my friends were split on was Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I was on the side of no, probably not, actually, BUT it was really cute and sometimes she likes to pretend her nose is like a dog’s, which led me to an elaborate mental scenario where you train dogs to sniff out Twix for you because people are hiding them and like, you need them immediately or something. Okay but the point is, no heightened senses here, just a kid being cute and dramatic to show that she knows that you have the thing she wants¹.

Other friends, meanwhile, were like, oh hey, yay heightened autistic senses! Because, yeah, autistics do sometimes have keen senses in ways that non-autistics can find quite surprising. And… I would not put that past my child actually. I just didn’t think it was the most likely possibility, all things considered.

But I didn’t really push back on my friends who did or argue with them or try to establish a definitive answer to the question of Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I thought that it was a worthwhile possibility to consider — does she have a smell map of our kitchen that she isn’t telling me about, and does that smell map have a special chocolate-caramel-biscuit category? Her sensory sensitivities can align with mine and then not align in interesting ways, so, it’s certainly possible! On the other hand, her deciding to pretend that she’s a dog in terms of ocular capacities is equally possible, because, well, she’s six.

Moreover, while my friends are largely quite chill in that they have autistic friends, family, or acquaintances whom they don’t segment like nobody’s business, NOT everybody is like that. There are plenty of places in our world where you have a surprising “useful” sensory, or other, capability, and as soon as you let on about it — goodbye privacy; goodbye childhood. You’re labeled a savant, is what I’m saying, and ain’t no coming back from that. Your BEST hope is to be wrung like a washcloth until all the impressive-usefulness is squeezed out of you, and then flung aside. (Worst is to be wrung out and then left there to see if you will somehow rehydrate, and when that doesn’t happen because all the water on the planet is being sold for $100 a bottle now, you are discarded entirely.)

So the point is, you can be Schrödinger’s Cat in terms of Whether You Actually Smell The Twix. But unlike that cat, we can’t just open the box and observe you and thereby force you into one state or the other. We are prohibited from opening the box, or it’s entirely too well-sealed in the first place.

Image details

Schrödinger’s Cat (With Spilled AI) by Sowocki (Adapted from Schrödinger’s Cat by Dhatfield, Source: Wikimedia Commons), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

I am interested in asking why we can’t open the box, and thinking about who is keeping us from doing so and why they might be doing that, not speculating about what is Actually In The Box (because that is simply not useful at this point; it’s both and neither). Furthermore, since in this scenario uniquely, my own thoughts and ideas are actually feeding and thereby creating whatever is in the box — alive, dead, Twix-smelling, whatever — I am actually pretty interested in the patterns of those thoughts, and how they are and aren’t changing as a result of this whole situation. If I am co-creating whatever is in the box, I damn well want to be aware of my own part in that co-creation.

There was a time in my life when I would have been entirely intimidated by the thought that my child, or any other close relative of mine, had such a keen sensitivity as to smell Twix in a kitchen when I could not. I would have thought deeply about what it meant for me to be related to such a person, and whether this implicated some of my own odd sensory capabilities and sensitivities in any way. I would have been embarrassed and awed by it; I would have wanted to simultaneously cleanse my kitchen of any Twix and stock it with so much Twix you wouldn’t have room for anything I could actually smell, with my comparatively puny ocular faculties.

And, yes, I would have treated that Twix-smelling person pretty terribly, ultimately, failing at the basic job of treating them as a human. I would have sought to commodify them and thereby mollify any implication that it was I who should be displayed, should be commodified.

I realize you are probably tired of hearing the abilities, or lack thereof, of AI compared to Twix and alive-but-dead cats. I am too. But the hype and lies are only going to ramp up from here on out. And the cat in that box, which we are forbidden to open, will continue to be both alive and dead.

Don’t let them distract you by which one it “actually is.” And remember that you are and always will be a key part of what it keeping it alive, if it is alive — and that which has killed it, if it is dead.

1. You might ask, “But why don’t you just ask her whether or not she actually smelled the Twix?” and I must inform you, dear reader, that that is not possible for reasons that have to do with how I do and don’t, and can and can’t, meaningfully communicate with my autistic child. Yes, she uses mouth words, but no, she does not use all mouth words in all ways that you might want or expect her to. That being said… she is learning to share, including Twix. ↩︎

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? 

Closely related to AI and Segmentation (my previous blog post) is AI and Spikiness. No, I’m not talking about AI becoming a resurrected triceratops and sparring with humans, Jurassic-Park-style. I mean peaks and valleys. I mean uneven cognitive profiles. I mean the Autism Fluctuation Nation. (Okay, I just made that up.)

Image source

Image adapted from Public Domain Stock Photo: https://picryl.com/media/anchiceratops-dinosaur-a72266

What I mean is that I am typing these words here, and many of you non-autistics would look at me and go “but your fingers, they move so FAST and you use so very many WORDS,” and maybe you would even be intimidated by this fact! But then you ask me to do… I don’t know, think of something that you assumed is simple because you do it in your daily life without really thinking much. Ask me to do THAT (or worse, stand over me after asking!), and watch as I grimace and either do it very slowly or in what to you looks like an entirely haphazard way. Or I avoid doing it at all, and you struggle not to label me stubborn or lazy.

Yeah. That.

Central to many autistics’ experiences of being spiky (my term of choice, because former-aspiring-goth-kid) is not knowing you are spiky until later in life. Now, this is not universal, and some of us did know in different ways. I certainly grew up knowing I was “good” at some things and… ah, much less good at others. But I had no real language for it or paradigm to fit it into. Consequently, I learned to hide the things I was “not good” at and be ashamed of them, or worse, to fear them. And because I had at least one sibling who was also mega-spiky (RIP)¹ and a parent who was as well, I watched this pathology (yeah, I said the P word) play out in my family, how we related to one another or didn’t, what got labeled Normal and what was A Problem.

That’s unfortunate because in many cases, my “not-good-at” things were not actually that big a deal, and I could have easily asked for help — but asking for help is yet another skill which must be learned. Moreover, it happens in a social context; one must be in an environment where one can do the asking — and remember that many autistics can’t ask using mouth words in a consistent manner and understand replies that also come in mouth words.

So, yeah. I knew I was spiky, and yet I didn’t. And this brings me to our AI friends, specifically Claude. We are all familiar with AI “hallucinations” — made-up little nuggets confidently presented by the AI model in question as fact. Claude has been in the news for this behavior (though it should be emphasized it is far from the only culprit). What’s more, Claude’s “hallucinations” are having real-world consequences; they are playing out in courtrooms where precise and fact-based reasoning is paramount.

I have “hallucinations” in scare quotes here because I do actually not think this is the proper term. If we are going to be talking about AI models as potentially possessing human-like qualities — and I don’t necessarily agree that we ought to, but the cat is more or less out of the bag here — we need to get better at recognizing their shortcomings as similar-but-different to those we experience, as humans, in our human societies.

And this brings us back to autistics, and specifically autistics who had to hide what we didn’t know and couldn’t do because we had been taught that only certain pointy parts of our minds were impressive and useful, and the rest were aberrant and bad. Now, we autistics are different from Anthropic’s lawyer who is trying to cover for Claude in that courtroom, since most of us don’t have deep pockets for one (please don’t come at me about Elon Musk; I really truly do not care). For another, we are human, and many of us actually care quite deeply about truth and the reality of things — more than many non-autistics think we ought to, in fact.

In contrast, I am not convinced that those LLMs “care” about those things in any meaningful sense of the word — it’s the people who build, maintain, and answer for them. The models are acting as they have been trained and are not particularly attached to the “facts” that they invent. They certainly do not accept those “facts” as authoritative in the social sense of we humans who read them and blithely accept them because of the attractive, intelligent-sounding trappings they come wrapped in. Yet at the same time, the LLMs also do not find the facts that they do NOT make up particularly authoritative, in the social sense through which we ascribe and revere authority.

Speaking of such revered authority: We humans have long treated measures like Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as authoritative fact (this has been coming apart in recent years, but only slightly). My own life trajectory has been tied up in this. I was assigned a “high” IQ score in my young, hiding-from-my-spikiness days, and now… well, now I am just not assigned one at all. Which is fine by me, actually! But it leads to some FUNNY wording on the part of the authorities who still insist on their right to do this assigning.

According to these authorities, my spikiness as an adult was so very marked that the mechanism through which my mind was to be assigned intelligence “value” basically short circuited. “Nope,” it went, “this isn’t like the 99.5% of humans I signed up to be an expert on — this person’s brain is a DISCREPANCY, thank you very much, and I don’t do discrepancies.”

Note that the little snippet I have pasted above is far from the only part of my psychoeducational report that used that word “discrepancy.” And, there were also plenty of places on it where I got “lower” scores, like one 3rd percentile and one 13th percentile. Some of those were in sub-tests that I recall struggling to complete, but others were in areas that I thought were entirely routine, if a bit boring or aggravating.

This was the most illuminating part of the whole testing process by far. My brain might have been full of discrepancies, but I now had language to identify them and give them form — plus an official-looking report with official-sounding language to back me up! I have wielded this report selectively in the years since, but it has definitely done me strategic good.

And, for every time that I have cited it as an Authoritative Medical Source in order to explain a need or advocate for an accommodation, I have also laughed at parts of it with my autistic and otherwise neurodivergent friends. We have laughed because it tried to segment me, to break me down, and well, it failed. I am superior over it, not it over me — and I do not mean that I am superior because of any quantitative percentile ranks. No; I am superior because I recognize it as a tool which (in nuanced ways it is true I do not entirely control) answers to me. I am sovereign over it, not the other way around.

This is where we are coming up short with AI. Those who are effectively in charge of Claude’s psychoeducational testing are not forthcoming about its shortcomings, its discrepancies, because they do not (yet) have an incentive to be. They benefit from keeping us in the dark about Claude’s own spikiness, about its peaks and valleys. From making us think that it temporarily goes insane and “hallucinates,” but is otherwise perfectly sane.

Without learning about and accepting my own spikiness, I was facing a future of continuing to deny it, of watching the denial feed off itself and get worse and worse and worse — much worse than whatever issue had set it off to begin with. Where I am now is much better, but I did not necessarily know that when I finally had to face the things that I could not do head-on. I had to be forced there, by a life unraveling that I have written about elsewhere on these interwebs and probably will not go into extensively here. It was dramatic, and I would not necessarily choose to do it all over again. But I did do it, and I am here.

Claude is undergoing some form of pschoeducational testing, I promise you that, as are its brethren. What’s not clear is what prompts that testing (bad press, lawsuits, or the like); who is entitled to the full reports on that testing; what their interests are; and whether they are going to continue to spin it so that we are distracted by “hallucinations” and other dramatic nonsense.

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1. _{This sibling did in fact die in their mid-twenties, and their death was not unrelated to their unacknowledged, unaccepted, unsupported spikiness when they were alive.} ↩︎