Love in the Machine: Ethical AI in Catfishing on CatNet and Person of Interest

[owlmoose]

I recently finished reading Catfishing on CatNet, the delightful new YA novel by Naomi Kritzer. This book is based on her Hugo- and Locus-winning short story, "Cat Pictures Please", which might be my very favorite work of short fiction. The viewpoint character of the short story, and co-protagonist of the novel, is an AI (known most often as CheshireCat in the novel, so I'll use that name here) who started out as a search engine but soon grew far beyond that, for two reasons: a genuine interest in making people happy, and an insatiable desire for cat pictures. Naturally, I find this character very relatable -- I, too, enjoy helping people and looking at pictures of cats, and if I could somehow center my life around those two activities, I'd be pretty content.

The novel is a wonderful story of friendship, but a little less than halfway into my reading of it, an unexpected comparison popped into my head, and it only got stronger as I kept going. Although they have entirely different purposes and origin stories, CheshireCat reminds me in many ways of another artificial intelligence: The Machine from the TV show Person of Interest. They both were trained to respect the importance of individual human lives, they both work in direct and indirect ways to improve those lives, and they both come to care very much for certain specific people. And it got me to thinking about the ways in which both of these stories are about the ethics of AI: how an AI learns ethics, whether it's possible for an AI to behave in an unethical or immoral way, and all other kinds of related questions.

There's no way to really write about this without major spoilers for the short story, book, and TV show, so I'm not even going to try -- spoiler wall starts here. If you've never read the short story, I highly recommend it; it can be found in full text here.

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I have answers to none of these questions, but I love stories that ask them. I'm really curious to see how CheshireCat grows in the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet, and maybe someday we'll get to revisit The Machine, too. (Anyone have any fic recs along those lines? Send them my way!)

What other stories have you read that have interesting things to say about AIs and ethical development?