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Imitative AI and the Urge To Erase Humans [1]

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Date: 2025-04-24

Henry Blodget, who I am apparently supposed to know based on the social media amusement at his latest project, has created a newsletter. That in of itself is not surprising. They let any idiot create one of those. What is interesting about it is just how deeply his first missive (have we settled on a term for individual entries of a newsletter? Post sounds too blog-y but newsletter is confusing. Plurals should plural — hear that, moose?) demonstrated how deeply, deeply anti-human imitative AI boosters can be.

Blodget is mostly being mocked for admitting that he sexually harassed his made-up AI “worker”. Okay, I know that all of those words are English, but even haven written them, I understand that they may not make a lot of sense in that specific order. So let me explain.

Blodget wants help in making his new newsletter. He professes to want to hire humans to do the work, but what he actually does is build a series of imitative AI “employees”. As a part of this process, he created fake headshots for his fake people. Blodget thought that one of the headshots was hot, so he sexually harassed “her”. I wish I was making this up, but here he is in his own words:

So, I told Tess this: This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess. Yes, I know. In a modern, human office, that would, in fact, be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. I regret saying it. In my capacity as Regenerator’s head of HR, I’ve given myself a talking-to.

Now, Blodget is an ass who shouldn’t be allowed near other humans. And yes, telling am imitative AI “employee” that they are hot is so far into the realm of cringe that it has found entirely unexplored regions of embarrassment and humiliation never before seen by human eyes. But more importantly, his justification for what would be an obvious breech of ethics, commonsense, and office decorum shows fairly clearly why he is so enamored of these made up “workers”:

Of course, in my defense, “Tess” and all my other AI colleagues are, in fact, not actually “colleagues” or “people” or “differentiated digital entities” but a ChatGPT account that has generated some names and pictures for me. Also, I was in the middle of a dazzling two hours of adrenalin-fueled astonishment at the speed with which a “native-AI” team could be assembled, and in awe of the inspiring charisma, energy, and enthusiasm of my new colleagues. I was also thrilled to, once again, have colleagues

Blodget, basically, appears to like having people he can abuse. The imitative AI creation, of course, “took my comment the right way”. That phrasing in and of itself is amazingly revealing. By “took the comment the right way”, he means that his faux-female imitative AI chatbot didn’t get all uppity and demand that “she” be taken seriously and not have to put up with creepy old men acting inappropriate at work. And, yes, it is inappropriate. You don’t preface a compliment with a long-winded excuse for being inappropriate if you don’t know it’s inappropriate. Women in offices should be able to work without having to determine if comments are meant to put them down or not. But that power seems to be what Blodget really likes.

The one thing that he mentions with every “employee” that he creates is that they are available 24-7. He makes up credentials for them, as if they were actual people, but he emphasizes that he can make them work for him whenever he wants. No, of course, what he is getting is bullshit generators. Even assuming everything works perfectly, he is going to have to spend a ton of time checking their output if he wants to ensure any quality. It is silly to think that machines that literally cannot stop making up nonsense in their output is suited for what is supposed to be a news driven, and therefore fact driven, organization. But that hardly matters — they never need rest or respect and always take comments the right way. The anthropomorphization make this even worse. He goes out of his way to give them faux-personalities and fake headshots, to make them seem like people as much as he can. He deliberately blurs the line between person and tool and then talks about them as if they are, in fact, people. They are the perfect slaves, er, employees, to him.

Too many people involved in the imitative AI world really seem to relish a world in which they have perfect servants, willing to do whatever they want, tell them whatever they want, and never require treating them as anything other than tools. Yes, it’s funny that Blodget sexually harassed one of his made-up chat toys. But that amusement shouldn’t blind us to the ultimately anti-human mindset that drives these kinds of weird behavior. Blodget and people like him seem to salivate over the possibility of an army of chatbots willing to work any hours and absorb any abuse. They idea of their own little human-like but legally exploitable “people” appears to be the real attraction.

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