Doc Ochs

@nochshorn.bsky.social

182 Followers 79 Following

Keeps writing new bios late at night. PhD from CUNY in English. Writing a book on nostalgia in fantasy fic. Writing about genre at Unwinnable. Writing music as Bunny Petite. NYC lifer.

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a romance, platonic or otherwise, about building an AI. It seems, in fiction, to be a mostly solitary pursuit, which tracks with the most hyped imagined applications of OpenAI’s products. What we have instead are many, many, narratives in which people imagine the future of this technology and how they could have sex with it. People are trying to fuck the robots in pretty much every fiction where the robots aren’t actively trying to kill them, and even some where they are.
Texts reading: Pop: if Mamdani wins, is Will gonna write a “tell all” book? Me: he’s already in contract
Rumors
Poison ivy
Stroller with a sticker that says “I ❤️ NY. Don’t rank Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women.”
Image of a goose with a book
The singles cover for Closer by the Chainsmokers ft. Halsey
What could a romance about building an AI look like? It’s possible this is still coming but I think it would turn tragic in the end. To build together, to enjoy that pleasure, only to create something that’s entire purpose is to deny others that kind of productive struggle? To be seen by someone only to promote the lie that we are reducible to text prediction? That would be a kind of hoarding, hugging the last romance to your chest and shutting the doors behind you. Your product would annihilate the love that brought it into being; a kind of self-patricide. When I try to image how one could have this plot and remain a romance, I can only imagine an ending where the technology is thrown into the sea like Prospero’s books, the lovers re-committed to their labors.
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a romance, platonic or otherwise, about building an AI. It seems, in fiction, to be a mostly solitary pursuit, which tracks with the most hyped imagined applications of OpenAI’s products. What we have instead are many, many, narratives in which people imagine the future of this technology and how they could have sex with it. People are trying to fuck the robots in pretty much every fiction where the robots aren’t actively trying to kill them, and even some where they are.