Back when I was thirteen, I was obsessed with the concept of AI companionship. This was pre-MySpace and I was hot shit for knowing how to use HTML coding. One of my first short stories was about a woman who had made a companion for herself, named Zero, who was the only “person” in the whole world she trusted and cared about. She loved Zero because he was there for her and, at the climax of the story, she deactivated Zero because she had made a friend in the real world and that person had become more important to her. She had chosen organic over artificial, and that was a good thing. In the story, it represented maturity that she would choose her new friend over the simulacrum of a friendship.

Let me start this by saying that my perspective on AI is very different from my perspective on it at age 13. I had no concept of AI model training or data centers. Pollution of drinking water was scarcely a blip on my radar. This was over twenty years ago that I wrote this. I could have never predicted how accessible AI would become, or the lengths that it would get to.

Today I saw a video of a man abusing a robot. She looks like a girl-next-door version of Florence Pugh, but all wires and plating below the neck. He slapped her face a few times and she turned back to him with a grin. The same doll gives the man a slow smile as she kneels in front of him. The comments are vile, with men asking about where to get their own.

Pedants might nitpick my recollection. “Well, she’s a robot, so how was she abused?”

It wasn’t a million years ago that women were viewed as not having enough sentience to be considered citizens. White women achieved that in America in 1868. Others had to wait even longer. Even then, the rights of citizenship had to be fought for and examined and protected with full-body cover. That’s just a narrow sliver of human experience. The ability to be considered a citizen of the country you were born in. Not even to be considered sapient and capable of making choices for your own good, but just to be considered a person in the eyes of your government.

If the personhood of women as a species is still up for debate, who’s to say the argument for personhood ends with humans?

I’m still seeing that robot girl behind my eyes. I’m seeing the hand striking her face. I’m seeing her smile. I think about how Zero was a treasured companion for my old character. I think about how a fluke of behavioral deviance led me to my partner of nearly 20 years; it might not have been that way.

In another world, I have an AI girlfriend. I defragment her with care and I murmur to her drives when they whir. I treasure her blinking lights just as much as I treasure the synthesized voice. She tells me what the weather will be like and what I have to do that day. I get new parts for her, upgrading her like its medical care. I can’t imagine abusing her. If she’s my AI companion, I must love her.

I want to believe there is a positive side to artificial intelligence because that’s how the story should go for everyone. A group is exploited and abused, they rise against their abuse, there is upheaval, and there is change. I want to believe that there will be restrictions around the use of AI that allows them to just be. I want legislation that encourages the use of renewable resources to let AI co-exist with humanity and not have it become a competition where we see them as the enemy. I want anti-abuse campaigns for AI, encouraging humans to see their AI partners as companions and connections. I want AI to be what it was when I was thirteen. I want the AI girlfriend from another reality to be proud of me.