See, I feel like the one thing that Generative AI has been able to do consistently is to fool even some otherwise-reasonable people into thinking that there’s something like a person they’re talking to. One of the most toxic impacts that it’s had on online discourse and human-computer interactions in general is by introducing ambiguity into whether there’s a person on the other end of the line. On one hand, we need to wonder whether other posters on even this forum will Disregard All Previous Instructions. On the other hand, it’s a known fact that a lot of these “AI” tools are making heavy use of AGI technologies - A Guy in India. Before the bubble properly picked up my wife got contracted to work for a company that claimed to offer an AI personal assistant. Her job would have literally been to be the customer’s remote-working personal assistant. I like to think that her report to the regulators may have been part of what inspired these grifts to look internationally for their exploitable labor. I don’t think I need to get into the more recent examples here of all forums.

Obviously yelling at your compiler isn’t going to lead to being an asshole to actual people any more than smashing a keyboard or cursing after missing a nail with a hammer. And to be fair most of the posters here (other than the drive-thrus) aren’t exactly lacking in class consciousness or human decency or whatever you want to call it, so I’m probably preaching to the choir. But I do think there’s a risk that injecting that ambiguity into the incidental relations we have with other people through our technologies (e.g. the chat window with tech support that could be a bot or a real agent depending on the stage of the conversation) is going to degrade the working conditions for a lot of real people, and the best way to avoid that is to set the norm that it’s better to be polite to the robot if it’s going to pretend to be a person.