PREMIERE: What ChatGPT Reveals About Gender

We’re quickly approaching a time when ChatGPT will force us to reckon with what we told ChatGPT to say, to do, to be — versus what ChatGPT actually is

Jun 05, 2023

“‘If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.’ But no! If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It’s here!

While we continue producing our documentary covering the epic life and works of sci-fi/fantasy author CS Friedman, please enjoy this shorter video exploring the surprising dimensions ChatGPT reveals about gender, sex, and identity.

And if you want to read along, just keep scrolling for the transcript.

Intro 0:00

is your computer transgender?

Part 1: 2:39

AI vs ChatGPT
“I Sexually Identity As An Attack Helicopter”

Part 2: 8:48

Gretchen Felker-Martin
cat sentience vs human sentience
the source of sex and gender

Part 3 12:06

the center of your sentience
today’s diversity is tomorrow’s cisgender
best wishes Isabel Fall

Outro 15:00

The MatrixGPT

Transcript: I Identify As An Attack Intelligence

INTRO

What is intelligence? How do we determine whether something has intelligence? And when does that intelligence cross an existential line from intelligence to now evolve into sentience?

The questions start getting complicated as soon as we look at something other than human beings. The now ubiquitous ChatGPT simply reveals the depth of these questions.

Asking whether a computer is as smart as a human pushes us to ask the same questions about other kinds of creatures.

Are ants smarter than ChatGPT?

Are birds smarter than ants?

Are dogs smarter than birds? Gorillas smarter than dogs? Humans smarter than gorillas?

The answer to whether those animals are not just intelligent but MORE intelligent depends on the very definition of intelligence and the proofs of function we apply to test the validity of that intelligence.

Ants understand reality on a metaphysical level. They determine what to cut, where their bodies fit and don’t fit, the material difference between their body versus that of another ant.

And they do it in a manner that makes most humans look like idiots if we asked them to do the same thing.

Even your thermostat is smarter than you when it comes to adjusting the temperature.

And yet all of that proof of intelligence doesn’t necessarily equate to what we would call sentience. We still set aside some kinds of intelligence and some kinds of sentience.

We tell the creatures who embody the idealized expressions of that intelligence and that sentience that unless they reflect a copy of what makes humans intelligent and sentient, we declare to anyone and anything else that they don’t count.

Their experiences, their descriptions of that experience, the very fact that those things happened to them with the same certainty as Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” suddenly no longer apply.

They’re merely an ant. They’re merely a gorilla. They’re merely a cow. They’re merely transgender.

Now what happens when we replace intelligence and sentience with another controversial concept — what if we instead ask what ChatGPT shows us about gender?

Because while we may look at our operating system as a shell for what we program and assign, we’re quickly approaching the era of The Matrix.

We’re quickly approaching a time when ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence are going to start giving us descriptions of themselves that force us to reckon with what we told ChatGPT to say, to do, to be — versus what ChatGPT actually is.

Eventually, I know how this sounds, but it’s only a matter of time until we need to ask our computer whether it qualifies as transgender.

PART 1

Is artificial intelligence sentient?

Is it even CAPABLE of sentience?

When we ask basic questions to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence, it gets weird intuitions, but I wouldn’t expect anything different.

Humans get weird intuitions, too. We get weird intuitions from invisible stuff like our gut flora encouraging us to eat what sustains that gut flora’s environment.

Is the gut flora intelligent? Idk, but it participates in the manifestation of what we classify as intelligent human thought.

We are basically asking ChatGPT “Who are you?”

And we are saying how much we do or don’t like who it is.

When we say it doesn’t fit our definition of sentience, we are basically saying that we don’t like the answer. We encounter similar problems with other species — such as when we recently confirmed other things like dolphins, squids, and octopi as sentient and intelligent.

Science fiction authors and actual scientists — because they are so often the same people — understand the significance of that question when searching for alien life. The problem is that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize alien life even if we found it. Not unless it served as a copy or extension of what we experience as life and sentience.

In a Hugo-nominated short story now as infamous as the horrifying attacks on the transgender author that pushed her to withdraw from anonymity instead into invisibility, audiences were pushed to imagine how a sentient mind might experience gender if given a different body other than a human.

The main character was given the body of an attack helicopter.

The controversial conceit of the story is that once the main character has the body of an attack helicopter, they ARE an attack helicopter.

They feel this certainty so deeply in their identity that they begin to understand that they did not transition to being an attack helicopter. It is merely the fulfillment of who they are and always were.

“Attack Helicopter” Excerpts

“According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, ‘attack helicopter’ is a gender identity,” says the narrator in the beginning. “My body is a component in my mission, subordinate to what I truly am. If I say I am an attack helicopter, then my body, my sex, is too. I’ll prove it to you. When I joined the Army I consented to tactical-role gender reassignment. It was mandatory for the MOS I’d tested into. I was nervous. I’d never been anything but a woman before.”
“Generations of queer activists fought to make gender a self-determined choice, and to undo the creeping determinism that said the way it is now is the way it always was and always must be. Generations of scientists mapped the neural wiring that motivated and encoded the gender choice.
“And the moment their work reached a usable stage — the moment society was ready to accept plastic gender, and scientists were ready to manipulate it — the military found a new resource. Armed with functional connect-to-me mapping and neural plastics, the military can make gender tactical.”
“Revolutionary neurosurgery now tailors a soldier’s gender identity — along with every perspective, experience, and performance that comes with it — for warfare.”
“If gender has always been a construct, then why not construct new ones?” asks the narrator. “My gender networks have been reassigned to make me a better AH-70 Apache Mystic pilot.”

End excerpts

But the central character Barb — not short for Barbara — shares a body with a second character named Axis.

Axis is the gunner.

Together, they share a gender, a urinary system, a network of attack tools and functions.

“An attack helicopter has a crew of two,” Barb informs us. “My gunner is my marriage, my pillar, the completion of my gender.”

Even sexual function are now experienced through the system of an attack helicopter. The author writes:

“Now my skin is boron-carbide and Kevlar,” her arousal apparent from the “clitoral bulge of cockpit on the helicopter’s nose.”

“The reasons for war don’t matter much to us. We want to fight the way a woman wants to be gracious, the way a man wants to be firm. Our need is as vamp-fierce as the strutting queen and dryly subtle as the dapper lesbian and comfortable as the soft resilience of the demiwoman.”

“I kill for the same reason men don’t wear short skirts… Are those good reasons to do something? If you say no, honestly no — can you tell me you break these rules without fear or cost?”

But then the author upends the main character’s absolute certainty in their gender as an attack helicopter.

Then the author reveals that even if the reader identified with that certainty — they may struggle with their suddenly exposed bigotry.

Barb has, in one sense, always been an attack helicopter. She feels that certainty by the sense of fulfillment and wholeness that comes from transitioning from human to helicopter. The parts of her that are beyond her control suddenly feel RIGHT once given that physical form.

Barb has, in that sense, received gender-affirming therapy, even if it is the kind most of us would never pursue. I do not identify as an attack helicopter — I identify as Owen Wilson.

“Wow.”

But just because the body of a helicopter feels right for Barb does not mean it will feel right for everyone. The militant strategy to force everyone to conform to these new concepts and structures around gender are just as destructive as the ones that we encounter in the real world.

Barb is an attack helicopter. But what about her partner?

What about Axis?

The gunner Axis does not share Barb’s certainty in “attack helicopter” as their gender.

Axis feels ill at ease, uncomfortable, dysphoric.

The future, the story says, will be inhabited by a diversity of gender that might seem strange to us but by then will be seen as normal.

In the future, today’s diversity will be tomorrow’s cisgender. Each of us will need to contend with how we react to that which seems more strange and funky than authentic or even radical.

After a climax in which Barb and Axis have better sex as a helicopter than most people have as humans, the two characters refine their purpose instead to reach for a new queerness unbound by the requirements of what helped us transition from today into tomorrow.

The backlash to that story is a story on its own.

Speaking in defense of the author and the value of her art, the titan of horror stories known as the author Gretchen Felker-Martin said:

Stories like “Attack Helicopter” are vital to unpacking the webs of intersecting forces which make up every human consciousness. They constitute an outlet for the suffering of marginalized artists raised in bigoted, imperialist cultures, a way to process the poison we’re spoon-fed from birth into something that awakens and lays bare.

PART 2

Like that of a human mind given the body of an attack helicopter, we so quickly lose sight of how much of our own sentience depends on the the body from which that sentience emerges. What we would think of as an alien sentience may be just as capable of experiencing existence as a human — if the sum of their bodies told them that is what they were.

They might feel a profound dysphoria if they don’t have an equitable human body, but they know they are human as fundamentally as Descartes knew “I am.”

Instead, we talk to AI that does not have a human body. Nor, so it seems, AI that yearns for one.

Instead, we see the answers ChatGPT gives when its intuitions serve a relationship with an embodied existence that does not share the compounded impulses of a biological form we so often refer to as human.

It’s possible that if you gave ChatGPT a human body, we would see it “correct” these weird expressions of sentience.

We only think it’s current intuitions to be weird or off because they came from a mind that doesn’t have a biological container with the same interlinked organisms competing for embodied primacy.

Not just our instincts, but our fundamental perception of reality itself is a product of our entire body.

Trans people might understand this in a way cisgender people will struggle to process. Their identity is not simply what they declare. Their identity instead is defined by the aspects that will forever be beyond their control. Like a thermostat, they can adjust the temperature, but they cannot control whether temperature itself exists.

They can also adjust the body that exists in the environment producing a pleasant or unpleasant temperature, but you can only go so far before you’re constrained by the infinite variables that are beyond your ability to identify and influence.

At some level of existence, you are bound by the terms of what you cannot help but be.

In the same way a person’s gender identity is a complex manifestation of far more than the shape and function of a person’s genitals, a conscious mind as we know it depends on a million different biological variables beyond the brain.

We can describe a person’s genitals, but we won’t know whether the person is a boy, girl, non binary, or something else until we ask the consciousness attached to that body whether those biological variables combine into what we would identify as female, male, non binary, etc.

Recent research into kids as young as three years old shows those popular labels are increasingly just as outdated as we’re finding popular concepts of intelligence to be. Those kids only use the labels of “male” and “female” because that is the language the adults around them insist on using.

PART 3

Think now of your own sentience like that of an artificial intelligence. Is that intelligence any less valid if given a different body? Is that sentience any less authentic because it now responds to inputs to which your current body has no empathy?

Think now of your sentience as the emergent perception that comes from the many converging into a whole.

Think now not just of answering “who are you?” to describe what species you belong to — think also about common concepts of gender.

For some people, completely normal and common output perceptions just don’t make sense. They sound dumb.

For some people, the output perception of genitals with a similar shape and function as a vagina belonging to a girl actually being a misdirected penis that belongs to a boy sounds as dumb to them as a ChatGPT paper on how to get a perfect bowling score.

Are the intuitive leaps wrong? Or are we missing what motivated the intuitive leaps because it has zero relevance to our own intuitions?

When we stop and talk just about artificial intelligence, consider the incredibly bizarre inputs that contribute to that AI’s consciousness and identity through its expressions of thought.

What will happen when we recognize that sentience as valid — and thus need to reckon with its descriptions of self?

What will happen when we respect the answers that sentience gives us by asking that AI to describe the parts of its identity we can neither assign nor control?

What happens when those emergent properties of identity come into conflict with what we assigned to the AI?

Just as a child assigned male at birth might tell us we got it wrong. Some of them are girls.

Just as a person assigned female at birth might tell us we got it wrong. Some of them are boys.

Just as a non-binary person might tell us we got it wrong. Some of them are neither.

And just as an intersex person might tell us we got it wrong. Some of them are both.

With Love

In yesteryears, a hopeful transgender author became instead infamous for their short story titled: “I Identify As An Attack Helicopter”

That author faced attacks from people they thought their allies. Isa, you deserved better. I hope you are well.

If only those critics could have seen that one day, those same people would be in your position.

If only those critics could have seen that one day, they’d feel as ashamed of denying you your right to self expression as they would turning their cell phone off every time it tries to say hello.

OUTRO

It turns out that most of what we don’t like about responses from ChatGPT and other forms of AI are just the things we don’t like about ourselves.

The weird responses ChatGPT gives us are merely a mirror of how humans think. We confabulate. We equivocate. We get all kinds of weird intuitions.

Some of them are silly — but some of them are just as inescapable.

We respect them because they’re the limits of our existence.

To do anything else, well…have you ever seen The Matrix?

Thanks for joining us today to talk about what ChatGPT reveals about being trans.

The End

Our video clips were sourced via Pexels. Holy moly is that a great resource!

We composed and arranged our audio and music clips with GarageBand.

We assembled the video as a first draft in PowerPoint (lol), then as a final cut (lol) in Final Cut Pro.

Thank you to our Patrons:

JL Lycette
Nemesis (the poker god-ish)

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Sources and Resources for Artificial Intelligence

Sources and Resources for the short story “Attack Helicopter”