True, but “racist” gets more of a reaction.
Only in the ultra-liberal world, and I say that as a person who is, basically, a liberal and who, basically, supports the large majority of the liberal agenda.
I don’t believe it’s possible to be “racist” against the current crop of LLM models and stable diffusion engines. I assume most outrage about it is performative internet nonsense. I have seen some people get overly ‘creative’ with trying to turn actual racist slurs into AI-related terms and use them which feels like they’re just happy to have a chance to cosplay being really racist while still able to say “Oh, it’s just about AI”. How much of that is playing out their dreams and how much is 2edgy4u teenage trolling, I dunno because it’s the internet and everything is stupid.
I think the OP just wants the term “bigoted”. It’s a broader term, and is needed here as AIs are not a “race”. (of course, humans don’t really have race either, but I’ll put that tangent to one side).
Yes it’s possible to be bigoted against them, and I’ve sort of experienced it a bit myself. When I’m watching a youtube video, if there’s a point where the voiceover “outs” itself as AI (by making an error a human wouldn’t make), I’m basically done listening. And I absolutely abhor the “debates” or interrogations of chatGPT on particular topics; I don’t even start to watch those.
Before anyone jumps into the reply box: I am not saying that this is bigotry. Right now, there are good reasons not to consider the AI as truly intelligent, and there are objective ways that those AI videos suck bearings. I am just saying: it’s a preview of what being prejudiced against a general AI might feel like.
A “fantasy race” is some variant of human; so close genetically that you can have a “half-elf” with a human parent, for example. While they often differentiate between a “human” and other races, they’re all genetically similar enough to be the same species or close enough.
I very rarely see the term “alien race” and then I do it’s a person misusing the term. It’s usually an alien “species”.
Scientific or not, “race” has a definition and as it’s used in common speech, it can’t apply to any and everything.
Note that in its latest edition (2024), Dungeons & Dragons has abandoned the word “race”, when referring to elves, dwarves, gnomes etc., in favor of “species”.
I was going to comment that “alien race” totally sounds like 1940s or 1950s SF. Not like 1980s or subsequent SF. @Alessan’s comment just above suggests the same thinking as applied to fantasy.
Argonians are the reptilian natives of Black Marsh, a vast swampland province in southeastern Tamriel. Argonians are a hardy race with scaled skin, sharp claws, horns and raspy voices.
A counter-example. There’s plenty of fantasy races that don’t fit your description. Lizard people, ant people, spider people, rock people, you name it. Which are sometimes called “races”, sometimes not; race is just a word.
Yes, of course. You can be racist to a person or a stapler or a baked potato.
The real question you’re asking here is to what extent it actually matters. I can use racially charged insults toward a stapler that’s displeased me, but of course the stapler can’t experience distress or offense or oppression.
I do think it’s a question worth asking though. To illustrate, let me draw an analogy: if you were in the room with a person who spoke to a dog using demeaning, degrading, and cruel language, perhaps going so far as telling the dog that they were going to torure it to death… you’d form quite a negative opinion of that person, wouldn’t you? Even though the dog has no comprehension of what’s being said, somehow that makes it worse, because it highlights how the dog is vulnerable and powerless compared to the human that’s verbally abusing it. If a person could behave that way toward a being that shows only affection, devotion, and obedience, how much of that behavior transfers to the way they treat human beings? I personally couldn’t overlook that question.
So it very much does matter how we treat things that present an appearance of sentience. If you make a point of calling an AI bot “a fucking clanker” or whatever, you know you’re using language that would be abusive if used toward a person. You seem to be relishing the fact that you’re getting away with using abusive language toward something that can react but not defend itself.
A different analogy: as far as I know, it’s not illegal to create a fully lifelike and anatomically correct model of a 5-year-old child and have sex with it. This doesn’t harm any actual child. But if you knew someone who did this, you’d certainly judge them negatively, wouldn’t you?
I care nothing about the rights or feelings of an AI bot. I don’t believe there’s anything in there worth caring about, nor that AI’s will ever reach that point. But they do give the appearance of something that could understand that it’s being insulted and abused. If you seem to relish the ability to abuse a thing like that, then this suggests things about how you’d treat other humans if you could get away with it, and they’re not good things at all.
What about those who just use it because it’s a neat tool and not because they are ignorant or greedy?
They don’t matter. Outside of how using a flawed tool like that screws themselves and everyone else over, at least. The average person isn’t the one making the decisions.
Is that a typo? You absolutely cannot be racist (or show any sort of bigotry) to a stapler or a baked potato.
It’s not a great example, if you’ve ever read a copy of the Lusty Argonian Maid…
(Don’t blame me, Bethesda keeps making that book show up in their games!!!)
(aside)
Which BTW is how Frank Herbert originally conceived that the Dune universe’s Butlerian revolt and the prime commandment against “a machine in the likeness of the human mind” came about. That man had used thinking machines to enslave man. Not as a stereotypical man-vs-machines conflict.
(/aside)
As others have said, currently you can be biased against AI use but it’s silly to say “racist” to refer to it. Honestly sounds more like the person is thinking of biased/bigoted/racist as interchangeable synonyms and reaching for the “hardest” hitting one to use in their rhetoric.
“Gah! You stupid fucking Manipovian stapler, cheap as your countrymen and twice as drunk! You jam because you’re too lazy to work, like all of your race!”
Yeah, I’m not seeing it.
I would actually say this fundamentally why it’s not OK to call someone racist for not liking AI (or any other collection of non-human). As well as putting different races on the same level as a things that are non human.
Race is almost entirely a social construct. There is no scientific dividing line between white people and black people. The idea that there is purely a societal convention.
That is absolutely not true about the dividing line between humans and computer programs that can do matrix multiplies very fast. It is very easy, and ethically a-ok, to come up with well defined scientific dividing line, based on objective evidence, that neatly divides humans on one side from computer programs multipling matrices on the other
Closest thing to that I ever heard IRL was Jeremy Clarkson’s depiction of Mexican-made cars. Which in fact was racist “humour” against Mexicans (but by then he was already in his “I want you to cringe” phase).
They are still ignorant.
…ignorant means that they don’t know something. What is it that you think that I and all the other people who use AI because it’s neat don’t know?
Something that comes up a lot in games (be they tabletop or many genres of video games with RPGs and 4X being the biggest) is the use of “race” or sometimes “man” as a descriptor of other sentient species. Especially ones that can be chosen by the player. That can even be a point for dealing with other intelligent species, especially as antagonists. For example, FFXIV defines “man” as the player character options (eight choices) and a number of other equally sentient species as “beast tribes” that acted as a secondary set of antagonists in the base game as well as a series of individual quest lines. A designation that has gone away in most cases in later expansions as the sheer number of known sentient species just gets bigger and bigger and even more complicated in terms of relationships. (There are probably close to thirty different sentient species in the game at this point.)
So yes, “race” might be wrong in games, but it’s consistently used in a way that connotes an idea that the groups have similarities between themselves that are more important than the differences.