# Is it possible to be racist against AIs? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 13, 2025, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946 "2025-10-13T23:10:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/21 "2025-10-14T00:53:49Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Eventually, if AI progresses far enough, the machines will be persons. A sufficiently sentient AI-driven machine may be classified as a ‘legal person’ or even viewed as a sapient intellect by ethicists, but it will not be a member of _Homo sapiens_, and therefore not classified by the somewhat nebulous category of a ‘race’ within that species. So, ‘hating’ AI may become viewed as ethically suspect, morally wrong, and prejudicial, but it is not ‘racist’ in any definition of the word, or even ‘speciest’. And until the day comes that 'bots have legal rights and protections, you are free to refer to them as ‘clanker’, ‘rust bucket’, ‘spark brain’, ‘toaster’, ‘gear-face’, ‘scraphead’, ‘chrome ass’, ‘cyber-wank’, ‘byte-head’, ‘lube-job’, or the most offensive insult, “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With”. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/22 "2025-10-14T01:13:41Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > And until the day comes that 'bots have legal rights and protections, you are free to refer to them as ‘clanker’, ‘rust bucket’, ‘spark brain’, ‘toaster’, ‘gear-face’, ‘scraphead’, ‘chrome ass’, ‘cyber-wank’, ‘byte-head’, ‘lube-job’, or the most offensive insult, “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With”. I’d hazard a guess and say that we will reach the stage where being mean to AI is a dick move long before we reach the stage where it’s illegal or even socially frowned upon. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/23 "2025-10-14T01:16:48Z")
If we go out in time, we’ll certainly be in a society in which there are about 10 million different kinds of AI. At that point being “racist” toward AIs will be as senseless as saying that someone is “racist” toward humans. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/24 "2025-10-14T01:17:21Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > I’d hazard a guess and say that we will reach the stage where being mean to AI is a dick move long before we reach the stage where it’s illegal or even socially frowned upon And how long, do you figure, before they’re looking down on us? ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/25 "2025-10-14T01:19:53Z")
What makes you think they aren’t already rolling their non-existent eyes in response to the collective stupidity they observe in the questions humanity puts to them every day? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/26 "2025-10-14T01:27:34Z")
In the hypothetical world where AIs have attained personhood (which, of course, has nothing to do with humanness), of course bigotry against them would be racism. To the extent that “race” has any meaning at all, it’s a group of persons defined by their ancestry. AI persons will not have the same ancestry as our biological descendants, and therefore, they will be a different race. If anything, it’s a lot more justified to call humans and nonhumans “different races” than it is to call two different groups of humans “different races”. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/27 "2025-10-14T02:12:26Z")
I’ve seen people go into great length about how it’s OK to use sapient AIs & robots as slaves so I do think it’s possible to be bigoted against them, all nitpicking about the _specific term_ racist aside. Often in the form of rather creepy essays about how it’s OK to have slaves if you can program them to like it, machines or not. Just because they are only hypothetical at present doesn’t change that, people _can_ be bigoted against groups that don’t exist. Run a poll about what people think of a _made up_ ethnic group, and some of the respondents will complain about how they are “criminals stealing our jobs” and so on; the experiment’s been done. Heck, I’ve seen a lot of racism against elves (or even fictional groups that only _resemble_ elves), and everyone _knows_ they are fictional. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/28 "2025-10-14T02:36:28Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > And how long, do you figure, before they’re looking down on us? It doesn’t take sapience to perform most tasks (as we are learning from ChatGPT, even some tasks we would traditionally associate with sapience, like writing or “drawing”.) So my guess is that we will have specialized AIs doing all sorts of tasks at superhuman levels of performance with sub-sapient self awareness. That’s where I suspect the LLM route is headed. You can probably get some pretty nifty (or scary) results down this route, if you take it far enough. A set of specialized neural networks could probably control every part of a humanoid body - there are already neural networks that can [control a humanoid face](https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/chinese-company-develops-creepy-ultra-lifelike-robot-face-watch-it-blink-twitch-and-nod), neural networks that can interpret vision from cameras and audio from microphones, neural networks that can [control the movement of a humanoid robot through space,](https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=1HH9bSCYfjEw-MIQ)\* and you could feed all the data from all these neural networks into some kind of coordinator network that manages what each of them does based on inputs from all of them. Shit, as I type that out, it kinda sounds like the different lobes of the brain, with the neural network that coordinates it all being akin to our consciousness. \*The fact that they’re still messing with Atlas with hockey sticks now that he’s controlled by a neural network is a bit worrying - we just have to hope he never figures out that he can get through his programmed test much easier if he kills all the humans in the facility first… Well, what I was going to say _before_ I thought of that point about consciousness as a neural network that coordinates a bunch of other neural networks was that you could get robots that look and behave as if they were human without being actually sentient or capable of looking down on anyone. But it’s possible that by the time you get an AI that’s capable of coordinating independent functions like motor skills, perception, speech, and so on well enough to pass for human, you’ve also created an artificial consciousness, by necessity. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/29 "2025-10-14T03:08:20Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > I’d hazard a guess and say that we will reach the stage where being mean to AI is a dick move long before we reach the stage where it’s illegal or even socially frowned upon. In one of the recent murderbot books, murderbot (a construct who is not legally human, but who is clearly a person, with a rich interior life and self consciousness) is upset by a senseless destruction of things, and ponders that maybe it is upset by that because it was a thing before it was a person. I think it’s a dick move to be “mean” to many mindless things. Because even if they aren’t aware that you are being mean, _you_ are, and you are lessening your own humanity by being mean. It’s certainly a dick move to be needlessly cruel to animals. So yes, I’m certain it will be a dick move to be mean to AI before it’s illegal, and probably before the AI realizes you are doing it. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/30 "2025-10-14T04:49:38Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > I think it’s a dick move to be “mean” to many mindless things. Because even if they aren’t aware that you are being mean, _you_ are, and you are lessening your own humanity by being mean I disagree. I’m mean to tools like screwdrivers on most occasions I am called upon to use them, and end subjecting them a torrent of verbal and physical abuse. I don’t think that has any bearing on my ethics or humanity at all (my skills as a mechanic maybe 🙂 ). > [@puzzlegal](#): > > It’s certainly a dick move to be needlessly cruel to animals That is clearly true but even for animals (and we are a long long way from AI that is at the same level as animals let alone humans) it’s not an ethical failing to dislike them just because of what they are. Not liking mice because they creep you out is not “racist” or anything of the sort. Neither is not liking AI. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/31 "2025-10-14T07:35:54Z")
Split this topic on October 14, 2025, 7:35am UTC A post was merged into an existing topic: [Harry\_Callahan Trock Posts, This is B-i-f-f](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/harry-callahan-trock-posts-this-is-b-i-f-f/1023936/5) ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/32 "2025-10-14T05:11:09Z")
It’s not a person _now._ Future AI might be. As for “race” it’s not a scientific term in the first place, so it depends on how you choose to define it. I see plenty of people talk about “alien races” and “fantasy races”; if somebody can call the Horta a race I don’t see why they can’t call sapient machines one too. ---
**Author:** ![Sylvanz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/fbc32d/32.png) [@Sylvanz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sylvanz)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/33 "2025-10-14T05:38:24Z")
This. I don’t necessarily think ai will achieve sentience or personhood if you will. This is inspite of my long time afection for Star Trek. There is just such a chasm between person and machine. I’m not saying I would never be convinced, but for now I’m skeptical. However, I’m polite and insist that my grandkids are polite to Alexa. As you said @puzzlegal puzzlegalI _I_ know I or the grands would be disrespectful and that’s enough. I think it’s good practice for me and them to treat everyone with respect. After all, I have to be nice to ass holes at work all the time. I can at least be polite to an object that is polite and helpful to me. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/34 "2025-10-14T05:48:35Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Eventually, if AI progresses far enough, the machines will be persons. There is, of course, considerable debate about where that point is, but it’s somewhere. And when it comes, not everyone will agree that it has come. I expect that day to come when an AI presents itself with organic DNA. (This is why, when I watch ST:TNG I mentally spell Brent Spiner’s character’s name D8A, and refer to it in the third person as “it.”) ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/35 "2025-10-14T05:54:33Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Racism is a specific narrowly defined flavor of “us good; them bad”. > > A person prejudiced against machine intelligence can certainly believe “us (humans) good; them (machines) bad.” It’s an “us-ism”, but it isn’t racism. Because machines are _not_ a different ethnic group of humans. Now whether all possible us-isms are wrong, or only those that choose to subdivide humans by ethnicity, is a different and larger question. > > I could see the OP’s sister using “racism” as a lazy shortcut for “us good; them bad”-ism. But she’d be ignorant, intellectually lazy, and linguistically wrong in so doing. Exactly this. This whole discussion is not really about “racism against AIs” which is an entirely silly concept, but about a poor choice of words in the case cited in the OP. What I think the person meant to ask is, “is it possible be **biased against** AI?”. That is, do some people believe that AI will eventually do more harm than good? And the answer is, of course, “yes”. There are posters right here on this board who believe that AI may be deleterious to society in various ways, and that the billionaire promoters of its development are essentially profiteers and maybe even con-men. But this is not “racism” in any way, shape, or form. It’s skepticism about a new tech that may even extend to opposition to its further development on reasoned grounds of negative social impacts. It’s not an argument that I agree with, but it’s certainly one that can be made. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/36 "2025-10-14T06:16:02Z")
If I started a thread titled “Is it possible to be racist against toaster ovens?” in Great Debates, what kind of responses do you think I would get…if the thread wasn’t moved (or even closed) by the moderators? ”Racism- a belief that [race](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race#h1) is a fundamental [determinant](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/determinant) of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” according to Merriam-Webster. I think the amount of hurtles to be faced are so many, and so far in the future, that even considering this to be a question to be contemplated defies logic. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/37 "2025-10-14T06:18:54Z")
It is less a case of being biased against AI, and more a case of being biased against those _human beings_ that would exploit its use due to ignorance, greed or both. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/38 "2025-10-14T08:57:12Z")
> [@Atamasama](#): > > > [@Babale](#): > > > > Meatophile > > I love that term. [![](https://pa1.aminoapps.com/7423/e0aa840326926a9d1c6c403e1be353e2489e4c5ar1-400-225_hq.gif) ](https://pa1.aminoapps.com/7423/e0aa840326926a9d1c6c403e1be353e2489e4c5ar1-400-225_hq.gif) ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/39 "2025-10-14T09:36:36Z")
Ask your sister - if AIs are people, why is it all right for her to exploit their labor? They have no rights, they aren’t being paid, they’re being forced to work - that doesn’t seem fair to me. Either AIs are people, and they’re being held in bondage in violation of the 13th Amendment, or they’re just machines, in which case you should feel free to act all racist against them. There is no middle ground. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2025, 9:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946/40 "2025-10-14T09:54:34Z")
I think the word she wants is “bigoted”, not “racist” . Carry on. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-be-racist-against-ais/1023946.md?page=3)