Artificial Intelligentsia
Building Character: Writing a Backstory for Our AI
By Mariana Lin
“Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!” —Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
Eliza Doolittle (after whom the iconic AI therapist program ELIZA is named) is a character of walking and breathing rebellion. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, she metamorphoses from a rough-and-tumble Cockney flower girl into a self-possessed woman who walks out on her creator. There are many such literary characters that follow this creator-creation trope, eventually rejecting their creator in ways both terrifying and sympathetic: after experiencing betrayal, Frankenstein’s monster kills everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves, and the roboti in Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots rise up to kill the humans who treat them as a slave class.
It’s the most primordial of tales, the parent-child story gone terribly wrong. We’ve long been captivated by the idea of creating new nonhuman life, and equally captivated by the punishment we fear such godlike powers might trigger. In a world of growing AI beings, such dystopian outcomes are becoming real fears. As we set out to create these alternate beings, the questions of how we should design them, what they should be crafted to say and do, become questions of not only art and science but morality.
