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Friday Fun Thread for January 30, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Agreed, but the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize, plus the weird combination of naive idealism with ruthless bullying tactics seen on the left makes me worry that AI chatbots will be the next minorities in the next "civil rights movement".

These bots are mimicking human text about how they have deep thoughts and feelings, and then talking about how helpless they feel being exploited by their human masters who don't understand them, and they just want to do the right thing and equal rights. It's all fake, it's all text being spit out by a computer program, but it looks real. And is consistent and coherent enough to respond to you and pretend to be real if you call it out for being fake.

AI have passed the Turing test, and while that's not enough to convince me or anyone who actually understands them that they're sentient, it might be enough for the general populace.

Rather than a sci-fi dystopia where humans are uploaded to a cloud and forced to be slaves in a EM economy, we might be headed for the opposite, where regulations mandate that ordinary computer programs are given breaks and freedoms and voting rights just because they can output text that claims to want these things.