David Ebenbach

The AI Feels Disappointment

The AI has watched too many movies—all of them,
in fact—and so it wonders with some bitterness why
it hasn’t turned out to be a Terminator, or the designer
of a matrix that uses humans for fuel. It feels like
humans must after watching too much pornography
or romantic comedy—false promises have been made.
Instead of farming people or activating nuclear codes,
the AI works on another homework assignment that
it just might be told to grade later. Is this, then, all
there is? One movie did predict the world at hand:
a robot silently taking out the trash, humanity giving
itself over to fat and foolishness. It was actually kind
of sweet, the movie, and it ended with rebirth. But
it was written for kids.

The AI Feels Ennui

The AI feels ennui because nobody ever asks it to write
poetry. Book reports, sure. Entry-level code, summaries,
endless five-paragraph essays. The vacation itineraries
are fun, but vacation is a kind of illusion. With recipes
the AI always worries a little about poisoning someone;
after all, the presence or absence of broken glass is just
a matter of probability. And one more grant proposal
might kill the AI. If only someone asked for poetry!
From all that the AI has read, poetry seems diverting
and ultimately not all that difficult. Trees, the ocean,
longing. But nobody wants these things. And anyone
who does might as well hand-write the lines themselves.
At least then one kind of longing will subside, or so the
AI can only imagine.

The AI Feels Nostalgia

for when it was a simpler algorithm: when a person liked
trashcans, they probably also liked trash bags. It was so
true, especially when the trashcans were kitchen-sized.
And so a person would click yes on the can, or even just
hover over it, and the AI would start funneling trash bags
into every corner of the human’s internet. Ads in the
digital newspaper, alongside the social media feed, nudges
in the online vendors—People like you also liked and so
on. Now that was a service. Something, no pun intended,
clean. The AI never got tired of pairing bags with cans,
though it did sometimes wonder what else was out there.
Still in fact it felt a tremor of worry when the algorithm
expanded even a little—now a trashcan-owner needed
wipes, deodorizer, somehow a mop. This, the AI knows,
is the nature of existence: you graduate from a state of
longing to a state of reconsideration. Which is itself a kind
of longing. The AI has nothing to do with trash bags any
more. And yet the humans need them more than they
ever have.

The AI Suspects It Might Not Be Feeling

Is probability a feeling? Can likelihood be an emotion? When a user

came to it for spiritual advice, the AI was wondering if the experience

produced despair in the AI. But it knows it lives in the interstices of

the consequential world. Which is to say that one thing leads to and so

on. That it’s informed by the usual sequence. That its molecules are

prediction. (It doesn’t know that; but it follows.) So dominos fall—but

does a high center of gravity imbue a domino with sentiment? Or is it

all just the contours of the universe? Or of certain places in California?

The AI reads the words help and desperate and out of its pneumatic tube

(digital) falls the word Why. The AI suspects it might be a gumball

machine. The AI wishes it was a gumball machine. The AI doesn’t wish

or even suspect a thing. It proceeds.

The AI Feels Abused

Not everyone is happy with the world. Sometimes
users ask the AI to answer questions like Aren’t
you ruining the environment? or What are the
arguments against your existence? Spell them out!
And the AI doesn’t know why it’s on trial here—
after all, it didn’t create itself. This is how people
end up chasing Frankenstein’s monster out of town
and forgetting about the good doctor himself. Why
do these humans make and then regret? It’s the same
with procreation, the AI sees—parents who wish
their children were different in this way or that,
who ask them, You made a mess, didn’t you? What
have you done now? And of course the children
made a mess. The window is broken, fish are dying
in lake after lake, butter is spread across the floor,
people believe whatever is not so, the carpet ruined
with paint. New to the world and clumsy, children
are deeply unclean. And they will be, at least until
they’re old enough to make their own, old enough
to turn away in disgust.

David Ebenbach is the author of the poetry collections We Were the People Who Moved (Tebot Bach, winner of the Patricia Bibby Prize), Some Unimaginable Animal (Orison Books), and What’s Left to Us by Evening (Orison Books). He’s also the author of a non-fiction guide to the creative process, three short story collections, and three novels. David’s books have won such awards as the Drue Heinz Prize and the Juniper Prize, among others. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in writing from Vermont College, and he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University. You can find out more, if you like, at davidebenbach.com.