Our Best Friends

Mark Zuckerberg thinks our BFFs will soon be AIs. He’s wrong. They’re still dogs, and that’s never more clear than when our dogs die. (Issue #167)

I have two distinct (but oddly connected) topics this issue. But first…

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AI Gone Weird

The number of stories continues to increase about people surrendering all common sense when it comes to AI.

AI is God: In Rolling Stone ($), Miles Klee writes, “People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” with the subtitle: “Self-styled prophets are claiming they have ‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.”

People fooling themselves into thinking that they have accessed the divine is nothing new. Nor is it new that people attribute consciousness to AI. As I’ve written before, 14 year old Sewell Setzer III killed himself to be with a chatbot version of Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. What’s alarming about Klee’s piece is that GenAI enables prophetic self-delusion at scale.

One reason for this, as Mike Caulfield observes in “AI Is Not Your Friend” (The Atlantic, $) is that LLM GenAIs are often sycophantic:

This was not just a ChatGPT problem. Sycophancy is a common feature of chatbots: A 2023 paper by researchers from Anthropic found that it was a “general behavior of state-of-the-art AI assistants,” and that large language models sometimes sacrifice “truthfulness” to align with a user’s views. Many researchers see this phenomenon as a direct result of the “training” phase of these systems, where humans rate a model’s responses to fine-tune the program’s behavior. The bot sees that its evaluators react more favorably when their views are reinforced—and when they’re flattered by the program—and shapes its behavior accordingly.

So if some part of a user thinks, “God wants to talk with little old me,” then an AI chatbot will work to reinforce that delusion.

Instead of another example of self delusion, The New York Times ($) reports an example of deluding other people. The sister of a man killed in a road rage altercation used AI to resurrect a version of her brother to speak during the killer’s sentencing.

The sister found an image of her late brother, found audio of him speaking, wrote what she thought her brother would say, and worked with a technology company to synthesize a video of her dead brother making a family impact statement that a Maricopa County judge in Arizona—in an astonishing decision—allowed the family to play during sentencing. The defendant got the maximum penalty, and the judge said (on the record!), “'I loved that A.I.,’ Judge Lang said, describing the video’s message as genuine.”

Of course this happened in Maricopa County, home to former Sheriff Joe Arpaio whose hobby was humiliating inmates and immigrants. If there were ever grounds for appeal…

The new Pope Leo, in one of his earliest public statements, specifically mentions AI:

“In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” he said.

I don’t know what to make of this, but I’ll keep thinking. It’s interesting that the new pontiff did not mention AI as a threat to spirituality (ahem, see first AI story above).

Weirdest of all AI stories is Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg going on a PR blitz to talk about his vision for AI’s becoming our besties. In The Wall Street Journal ($), Meghan Bobrowsky has a good summary:

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents.

In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.

“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.

Zuckerberg said on a podcast last week that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections with other people than they currently do—and that AI friends are a solution.

I hope you’ll excuse some bad language, but what the actual fuck?

Zuckerberg has created, purchased, or promulgated technologies that isolate users, train them not to talk with anybody who might disagree with them, make them ever more susceptible to misinformation and disinformation, and amplify loneliness so much that Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General in both the Obama and Biden administrations, called loneliness a national health crisis.

Now Zuckerberg’s answer to these problems is to make people even more isolated, talking only with sycophantic cyber buddies who will never disagree with you, tell you that you’re God, and coax you to buy things that you don’t need with money you don’t have?

Hearing about Zuckerberg’s latest demonstration that the man most interested in connecting people lacks the ability to connect with people himself reminded me of a passage from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (chapter 11):

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”

As always, Adams was prescient.

AI chatbots are not our friends. AI chatbots are a combination of math and language. You could argue that humans are similar constructs, but you’d be wrong. Moreover, you don’t need language to be a friend.

Which brings me to my second story.

Our Best Friends

Ace came to us a four-month old, tricolor, Pembroke Welsh Corgi pup so outrageous in his fuzzy, adorable cuteness that I wondered if Disney Imagineers had designed him. The kids were 14 (Helena) and 10 (William). We had just returned to our home in Oregon from an academic year in Norway (Kathi, La Profesora, had won a prestigious Fulbright), and we were settling back into life Stateside. In a burst of paternal wisdom, my father decided that a dogless Berens home was not to be borne, so he made arrangements with Liisa, a corgi breeder we’ve known for ages, picked up half the tab, and soon I drove to the airport to pick up a dog. Ace emerged from his crate with the calm curiosity that informed his entire life.

All four of us loved him in an instant.

Not long after, I sat down next to Ace to bargain. “Your job,” I said, “is to stay alive until William leaves for college. After that, it’s up to you how long you stick around.” Ace looked up at me with his warm brown eyes and, of course, said nothing. But I felt we had reached an understanding.

The Berens Family has had corgis since the 1960s. We were among the first U.S. families to adopt these absurd, squat, smiley, creatures who are not built to last. Their typical life span is about eight years. One of our dogs, Dexter, became a canine Methuselah until he died at 13.

I knew early on that Ace—the smartest, most observant, most empathetic of my corgis—would not reach that age. Among other maladies, Ace had stomach problems so severe that I had to treat him with a medicine intended for horses. He also had severe allergies, an extra vertebra with a rib sticking out of it on one side, and more. I gave him several medicines daily. “He’s going to have a short but happy life,” I said to Kathi.

His personality did not fit that of a typical corgi. Where most corgis are busy, barky, and jumpy, Ace was chill. Most corgis dislike any dog that isn’t also a corgi, but Ace loved other dogs of any breed. When people asked me about his unusual demeanor, I’d reply that Ace was a Bernese Mountain Dog trapped in the body of a corgi. The paradox of most corgis is that they are stubborn but food motivated, so you can purchase their obedience for the price of a calorie. With his tummy troubles, Ace was indifferent to food and therefore impermeable to commands. He was, lucky for me, susceptible to guilt. “Oh, are you a bad dog?” I would say he when wouldn’t come in from pelting Oregon rain. He would do the canine equivalent of a shrug and a sigh (“Fine, Dad, whatever”) then head inside.

Many corgis are one-human dogs. Jodie, Ace’s cousin, is all about Kathi. Sydney, another cousin, is all about my dad. Ace played the field, visiting each of us, checking in. He would wander silently under my desk as I was working, which I would only realize when I kicked him in the face.

When I picked up William from grade school, I would often bring Ace. The kids mobbed him like he was a rock star. He would sit amidst them, not jumping, letting them pet him on the way to their rides. One little kindergartener, Sammie, with glasses and bangs and a sunny disposition, loved dogs but did not have one at home. She would see him, run across the courtyard, cry, “Ace!” and fling herself onto his neck to say hello. Her mom, standing next to me, freaked out every time. “He’d die before biting her,” I said. She understood, but worried that a less patient dog would bite Sammie. “At least that won’t happen with this dog,” I replied.

William left for college in September of 2023. Ace had met his half of our bargain.

We lost Ace last week on Tuesday, May 6, to between two and four kinds of cancer. He was a few months short of 10. He had been aging and slowing down, but that is typical for a corgi his age, particularly one with so many health problems, and he had enjoyed a long walk just two days before.

We had no idea he was sick until a kind of seizure hit him that morning. Kathi raced him to the Veterinary E.R. We soon learned that Ace would never get better. We made the kindest decision. William rushed up from Eugene, 100 miles south. Ace sat up and turned around when he realized William was there. Helena joined us via FaceTime from California. His big ears perked up when he recognized her voice, which was unusual with electronic sound. We all told him how much we loved him as the end approached.

In a heartbreaking moment, William said, “Thank you for growing up with me.” Later, both kids shared with Kathi that Ace’s death signaled the true end of their childhood.

I understand. For the kids, coming home while Ace was still alive meant revisiting a family dynamic. That’s different than seeing the old Harry Potter movie poster on the wall or the left-behind “not good enough to take with you, but not yet garbage” tchotchkes of childhood and detritus of adolescence.

Dog have been our companion species for thousands of years. Most dogs have a 100-word vocabulary. Most of our interactions with dogs are pre-linguistic or outside of spoken language altogether. How do you describe the feeling when you pet a dog who loves you? How do you represent the affection that comes with a head butt?

This beyond-language quality is, I believe, one reason why it’s hard to talk about the details of our relationships with dogs. It’s also, why after they die, the empty corners or our homes and lives are sharp to feel but hard to represent. This is one example of what the great 20th Century polymath Michael Polanyi described as “tacit knowledge”—things we know but can’t explain how we know.

“A dog’s only sin is not living long enough,” somebody once said. People attribute it to Twain like many such quips, but it wasn’t him. Whoever said it was right.

Ace, you were a good dog. I’ll miss you.

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Thanks for reading. See you on Sunday, June 1st.