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The Anti-Humanity of Imitative AI Hypsters [1]

['Greg Dworkin']

Date: 2026-10-11  

I once, when trying to learn some obscure point of Android app messaging programming that I have never, ever, ever used in a meaningful professional setting (look, I am a nerd. I think that should be pretty clear by now.), created an app that would periodically, without intervention of the user, text a romantic saying to a designated person in your contacts. At no point did I use it past the point of proving to myself that I had done what I set out to do, and I never even pretended I wanted it to take over communicating with my wife. That, apparently, makes me unfit to live in our new imitative AI paradise.

Imitative AI boosters spent this week on social media talking about what AI can do in your life. Specifically, it can play your fantasy football league for you, and it can read your children bedtime stories. These are not made up — real people really told the world they would rather have a computer do their hobbies and interact with their children than do either themselves. The fantasy football man at least said he didn’t like fantasy football, that it was only a social obligation. The parent, though? The parent seemed proud of himself.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that your friends sometimes do things you don’t really enjoy. The point of friends, though, is that you enjoy their company even when you aren’t enjoying the activity. And if they are your friends, you can always ask them to do something you enjoy as well — and they will almost certainly say yes. The parent, however, doesn’t even have that flimsy excuse. He seemed genuinely proud of his plan to have an AI read his kid a night with a voice modeled on the parent. Parenting hit different when you work in AI, he said. So will having kids that never call you, I imagine. Because parenting is not a formula, a dry series of perfect steps that lead to happy kids. Parenting is getting your hands dirty, living through the frustrations of kids who will not sleep more than an hour, please, God, just one fucking hour, please, and not knowing why they painted the cat blue. Parenting is being there with your kid, watching as they experience the world for the first time, good and bad. Parenting is hard conversations, joyously mindless conversations, chores not done, and sitting in a too-small bed cuddled with them as you read them their favorite book for the one millionth time. That’s how parenting should hit.

Both of these people are trying to replace human interactions with machine code. It is a deeply, deeply broken attitude. They’re creating a world in which they automate human connection so they can … spend more time on spreadsheets? That, needless to say, is entirely backwards. You are supposed to use technology to spend less time on your boss’s work so that you can spend more time with the people you love. But it is a symptom of a larger issue.

A lot of people involved in imitative AI genuinely believe the things that make us human — creativity and connection— do not matter. Anthropic changed their models to prevent people from “abusing” them to the applause of their competitors in the space — but AI firms still haven’t been able to create models that do not cause mental health issues for the people who use them. They research AI “pain”, but discount the impact of AI on human cognition. They claim that AI will doom us all, but build it anyway. Life matters less than silicon.

We are in thrall to people who have completely disconnected themselves from normal human feelings and expectations. A silicone religion that prioritizes efficiency in everything, even, perhaps even especially, in your relationships with other humans. One that considers the pain of programs but still considers the man who murdered hundreds of thousands to be a member of their club in good standing. There are lots of reasons to be suspicious of imitative AI: the damage they do to human mental health; the damage they do to the information environment; the damage they do to the environment; the theft they are built upon; the way they concentrate even more wealth into the hands of the worst people in the world. The most important reason, though, might just be that it is being created by people who love it more than they love their fellow man.

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