Comment:

Many readers have noted that characters in Forward keep feeling the need to explicitly declare that the cheerful and helpful AIs around them are not humans, are not sapient, are not real friends, have no souls, and deserve no rights. As Lee correctly pointed out, having to repeatedly force yourself to do something that feels mean can make one into a mean person. (Lee is, perhaps, a statistical outlier, given that, until the events of the strip, the vast majority of their conversations were with AIs and not humans.)

The world of Forward has laws against impersonation - as shown, AIs may not have noses, ears, or five digits per hand, and their voices must always have a distinct hard edge to them (except for playbacks quoting a human, which are allowed). Our world does not yet have those regulations, and, even if they were enforced, would only be on a national level, and therefore would not apply to the Internet.

As our own timeline careens towards algorithmically-generated chaos, I do think that this kind of nasty discipline will become painfully necessary. More and more videos of pretty smiling people, advocating for causes and requesting money, will have weird blurry edges and subtly wrong fingers. More and more articles and emails and social media threads will be written by Markov chains and autocorrect. More and more documentaries and political commentary and call-out tea-spilling receipt-bringing will be straight-up lies. Within the next decade, you will have to train yourself to look a filthy, starving, injured child in their watery eyes and say "that's fake, fuck you".

Maybe you'll spot a blurry finger. Maybe you'll just convince yourself that you did. The algorithms are getting better and better at hiding that shit every day, after all. You can spot it now. How confident are you that you'll be able to spot it in the future?

Robots may not ever attain "souls". That question is above my paygrade.

The real question is: can you hang onto yours?

Transcript:

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0401– 2167/07/07/12:06 - Orb’s office
BM: Do I detect animosity?
PH: Only in the same sense that you might find yourself swearing at a table leg that you had stubbed your toe on. The device is quite vexing, and responds atypically to certain commands.
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BM: Atypically? How do you mean?
PH: When I pointed out that its “breasts” constituted advertising for sexual services, which is not permitted on campus grounds, it claimed that they were beverage dispensers, and proceeded to squirt distilled water in my general direction.
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BM: It has a sense of humour, is what you’re saying.
PH: Drones that can display immature humour are even more common than drones that can quote Socrates.
BM: Still, I’m kinda sorry I missed it, sounds like quite the display.
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PH: Well, if you stick around the campus, there’s a nonzero chance that you’ll bump into the thing, assuming your monogamy with Orb doesn’t extend to filtering sex toys out of your perception matrix.
BM: Hmm, forecast says it’ll get up to twenty-nine later today, I might see if I can get a refreshing little ~mist~ for my walk home...
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