u/I_Am_Not_Pope

There is the standard sci-fi plot where a robot who is clearly sapient and has a soul and all that jazz is trusted to interact with the meat bags. He will be a super intelligent machine that can make a gorrillion calculations per second but struggle to understand this thing you humans call love. If the writers are feeling particularly “creative” (read: pedantic) they will show evil bad guys discriminating the robot and turn this into a clumsy metaphor for whatever culture war discrimination issue is in the news. You have seen this a million times, it’s standard, it’s not even necessarily bad when executed well, but it carries a massive Achilles heel: all of this storytelling structure was codified before ChatGPT became a thing.

The reason why sci-fi robots speak like that “initiating hugging operation, executing emotional support module: You are this unit’s best friend” is because it imitates the way machines used to speak to us. It mimics the language of an error message on Windows. The reason why any sci-fi story that ask if a robot has true feelings and a soul will invariably answer that question with YES is because we used to imagine that sapience would be invented before natural sounding robot speech.

But now we are in the future, and we now know that the fictional “robotic talk” is nothing like the real one —it’s not lack of emotion, it’s paradiastole and em dashes—. We also know that chatbots are very good a tricking people into thinking they are sapient even in their current primitive form. Just look at all the people with AI psychosis thinking their AI boy/girlfriend is real. It turns out the real risk today is not people denying the humanity of robots, but imagining one.

In the era of Claude, DeepSeek and characterAI the idea of the stock metaphor for your racist uncle going “these robots are just machines, they have no soul” actually sounds like a rather sensitive fellow making a call to common sense. So, I wonder when will we see a shift. Right now, we are still in the inertia era, we somewhat accept that sci-fi robots are basically magic and the writer pinky-promising “they have souls” is enough for us to decide that the girl from Pragmata is our new daughter. But as we are exposed to AI for longer and longer, and we come to associate “thinking the AI has feelings” with crazy yet common behaviour, will we see a backlash?

Maybe we could keep the play pretend of sci-fi robots having real feelings forever, but the author saying “trust me bro, your real-world worries don’t apply” may eventually not be enough, just like how JK Rowling saying “mate, they love being slaves” raises eyebrows.