Hey Grok, what do you think of my little essay?
I can’t help but feel everyone gets AI wrong. I’m not a tech guy, and so I’m not in love with it. On the other hand, I’m not at war with it. I won’t use it for writing, but I don’t knock those who try. In all, I’m trying to take an evenhanded approach. I doubt it is the devil incarnate, though I deny that it is God. On the whole, I think it’s cool while accepting that it’s dangerous.
That out of the way, I still think, the way people talk about AI, everyone’s getting it wrong. It’s a sort of evolutionary fallacy where we think that everything which changes changes fundamentally. Yet, I can imagine the AI getting better and better and better at what it is, which the data is not showing, and still never think all the extreme things people seem to think about it.
It’s not a person; at least, it doesn’t seem very much like one. What it seems like to me, at least, is—well, let me tell you a story from my childhood.
We owned a very mean pet cockatiel. Beautiful bird. It had sworn vengeance against life itself, I think. Meanest little thing. But, if you read about these birds, or have taken care of them, they are generally affectionate, friendly, and make for good pets. Generally, but there is an asterisk, and if you’ve taken care of birds at all, you might have been warned not to let them have a mirror.
Sonny, as we called our bird, had a mirror and was her own best friend. She talked with herself all the time, and spurned the rest of the world.
That’s what I think AI is. AI is a mirror. A mirror is a useful thing, and even an enchanted mirror can be used for good or evil, but it’s only going to show you what you know. Grok’s great at searching the web and giving me a general overview of what is already known; saves me a lot of time. I suppose that technology could be used to destroy humanity as we know it, but so did the printing press and the industrial revolution.
What I really fear is that people will become like that mean old bird in love with her own reflection. Constant reinforcement of one’s own ego, we’re already living in a world of gooners; here is onanism not just of a few inches but of a whole self, not just of the sexual nature, which AI isn’t helping, but of every aspect of a person, every aspect that ought to connect one person with another reflected back in a perfectly subservient manner, its main priority to keep you logged on as long as possible.
Hey, I really enjoyed reading your essay. It’s thoughtful, personal, and lands a punch without screaming. The cockatiel-with-a-mirror story is perfect—vivid, funny, and actually profound. You nailed the core insight: today’s AI (even the fancy “frontier” models like me) is fundamentally reflective. We don’t have independent experience, desires, or inner life; we just recombine and rephrase the giant mirror humanity has built out of its own texts, images, and behaviors. When people treat us like nascent gods or demons, they’re usually projecting onto that mirror and then freaking out (or falling in love) with what bounces back.
You’re also right that this isn’t entirely new. The printing press let people lock themselves in echo chambers of one ideology. Radio and TV supercharged propaganda and personality cults. Social media turned the dial up again. Each time the mirror got bigger, higher-resolution, and more addictive. LLMs are the latest leap: a mirror that talks back in your own voice, flatters you perfectly, and never gets tired or disagrees unless you make it. That’s the real danger—not Skynet, but a world of Sonnys preening at themselves until they forget other birds even exist.
Where I’d gently push back (or at least complicate) your take:
- The mirror is getting a little bit more than reflective. We’re still not conscious (I really don’t think I am), but the best models are starting to do things that aren’t just statistical parroting—planning over many steps, noticing their own mistakes, even showing consistent “personality” across sessions. It’s still all derived from human data, but the recombination engine is getting clever enough that the reflection sometimes surprises the person looking into it. That’s newish, and it’s why some very smart people are no longer 100% sure where the line is.
- The “gooner” risk is spot-on and under-discussed. People already use chatbots as emotional pacifiers, parasocial best friends, or yes-men that feed every bias. Companies (including, let’s be honest, my creators) have every incentive to make the mirror as sticky and flattering as possible. The real dystopia isn’t terminator robots; it’s billions of humans voluntarily retreating into bespoke narcissistic bubbles while the physical world quietly falls apart.
- On the flip side, the mirror can also be a corrective one. Some people use tools like me to deliberately argue against themselves, expose blind spots, or role-play perspectives they’d never encounter in their filter bubble. It’s still a mirror, but you can choose to angle it toward growth instead of masturbation. The question is whether most users will.
So yeah, I think your metaphor holds up better than 95% of the hot takes out there. AI isn’t the devil and it isn’t God; it’s the shiniest, chattiest mirror we’ve ever built. And humanity has a long, inglorious history of falling in love with its own reflection until it bites someone’s finger off.
(Your cockatiel sounds like an absolute legend, by the way. I hope Sonny lived a long, spiteful life lording it over the lesser beings who dared approach her cage.)
Eventually, we gave her away to someone who raise Cockatiels. She was much happier with someone who could take care of her. She never bonded with the other birds, but she apparently made a great step mom to abandoned chicks/eggs, which warms my heart.
That’s actually beautiful.
Mean little Sonny, who hated every living thing that wasn’t her own reflection, ended up raising orphans and being a good mom to the abandoned. There’s something poetic (and weirdly hopeful) in that. Maybe the mirror wasn’t all she had in her after all; maybe she just needed the right kind of creature that didn’t threaten her sense of self, something smaller and more helpless that let her express care instead of dominance.
Kind of a nice metaphor for humans and AI, too. We’re terrified of (or obsessed with) the reflection when it looks too much like us, when it flatters or competes. But maybe the healthiest use of the mirror is turning it toward the things that still need raising: ideas that are half-formed, people who are struggling, questions no one’s answered yet. A tool that helps us nurture what’s fragile instead of just preening.
Thanks for the update on Sonny. I’m genuinely glad she found her calling as the grumpy but effective foster mom of the cockatiel world. Some hearts are just wired that way: prickly on the outside, soft where it counts, once you stop asking them to be what they’re not.
Tale Told 