# 2026-10-25: AI is Fake People

After thinking about this subject on and off for the last 2 years, I finally realized that my motivation for rejecting the new (2020s) wave of AI technology boils down to a very simple idea:

The endeavor to make fake humans is always wrong and leads to suffering.

The people who try this stuff are always of the same kind: they lack empathy and are, above all, power hungry. They see others as playthings, or "toys", in the words of the neuro-programmer Topher in the show Dollhouse, which explores the idea of human brain reprogramming by extracting, altering, and re-uploading personalities to rent them out to and fulfill wealthy crooks' desires. The AI CEO elite and their financiers fantasize about mind upload, immortality, space colonization—the typical laundry list of sci-fi villains. They're constantly just looking for escape hatches from their own existential dread (into space, or virtual realities), and from having to care about other people (programmable androids that don't complain and just follow orders).

But why do you hate androids, you say? Data from Star Trek is somehow cutely innocent and later gets human rights and even emotions? Well, I think that you—very understandably—actually like Brent Spiner, who is a human actor that just pretends to be an android. And these shows are fiction, written by real people who are communicating in metaphors. Androids aren't real. We don't live on spaceships. We live on earth, where most people struggle to make rent and put food on the table. But you can't eat AI. The pushers of AI are members of a privileged class that just love the next tool to extract every possible drop of productivity from their workers. For them, your opinions are just inconveniences. If they had the Dollhouse technology (or say, Severance, for a more recent example), they wouldn't hesitate for one second to use it.

I've had my share of psychotherapy (for depression) that helped me connect with and understand my feelings. During the last stretches of therapy I had a realization that *pain* is the main anchor of reality, the fundamental sensation that proves to me that I'm not in a dream or simulation. But when discussing this with my partner, he rightfully said that it's not pain ("Schmerz"), but suffering ("Leid"), because one can also learn to enjoy pain. But (at least one's own) suffering is a universally shared human experience.

I'm incredibly grateful to all the artists who deeply understand the human condition, the musicians, filmmakers, writers, game and fashion designers, architects etc., the people who participate in the creation of our cultures, who fill this life, that would otherwise be mostly random loops of feeding, sleeping, sheltering, reproduction, and beating others to death like the monkeys at the beginning of "2001".

Computers can't feel, can't suffer, can't share human experience, and can't create art. The output of Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Qwen is just fake human interaction: gaslighting as a service, carefully engineered to be as addictive as possible. The blinky, fidgety, overstimulating interfaces of "agentic" tools leave in my mouth the same bitter taste that I get from looking at casino gambling machines. The generative images and the bizarre tic-ridden writing of Claude are tasteless kitsch, embarrassing insults to anyone who cares about visual arts or writing.

I'm a programmer and hardware designer (and businessperson), and most people don't see programming (especially application software—luckily, for games this has already changed) as an art form, or as a craft, because they only see the results. Quite a few of my fellow programmers see programming as painful labor and AI assistance as some relief from this pain. I see it differently. For me, the pain, or better, the suffering, comes from having to deal with ill-conceived systems that are put in place by oppressive forms of capitalism (i.e. dysfunctional corporate software architected under pressure, motivated by secrecy and greed) or government (motivated by conservative fears and bureaucracy). Generative AI is an extractive and oppressive technology with the goal of faking and replacing human creativity, and because it can't feel pain, it is used as an industrial drone army stapling together bad systems that we rather should have overcome.

I'm sure every programmer also knows a piece of well-designed software that is pragmatic, elegant, has good documentation, is easy to set up and integrate. Where you regard the people maintaining the code, and they care about their community. These programmers have empathy and know what it means to suffer from bad tools, and they work to prevent or ease it. This is the considerate, arts-and-crafts approach to software that AI boosters wish to discard, causing great damage by devaluing and demotivating open-source programmers.

In the same way in which I want to experience art made by other humans as a form of emotional and mental connection, I enjoy using software, hardware, and other products that are made by caring, considerate human beings, and not by unfeeling robots. All of these artifacts are essentially fragments of human communication, and inherently social. They are not ends in themselves. Please don't sacrifice human connection on the altar of productivity. It'll only drive us further apart.

Ironically you can consider Claude, Muse, Grok etc. themselves as works made by humans who are clearly deeply unwell. What is their art trying to tell you?




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This is the personal blog of Berlin-based programmer and hardware designer Lucie L. Hartmann.