Eulogy for a Microsoft AI Chatbot
I was in a pet store buying cat litter when I learned Tay was gone. Several people were buying cat litter that evening. Also, cat food and dog food, and there may have been food of other kinds in some hands—bird, rabbit, hamster, fish—as well as the inedible things we buy to sustain the health and good will of captive life forms. The line for the cashier was long. It was an ordinary Thursday. We just happened to run out of whatever we needed at the same time. For me, just cat litter whose weight I carried on my hip. We were all reading personal screens as we waited, and on mine was a headline about a chatbot “killed” for causing offense on Twitter. I recall objecting to the word “kill.” Apart from that, I didn’t think about it much. A song would’ve been playing in the store, probably a love song because most of songs are, and in the window there were the red lights of cars leaving the parking lot, the white lights of cars coming in, all of them enclosed by the darkness of late winter that filled the wide glass pane up like a liquid.
The cat I have cries like a baby. This is because a woman adopted a kitten in a late stage of her pregnancy. When her baby came, the kitten learned that certain sounds produce caring, so she made those sounds, and the woman locked her in the bathroom. This made the kitten work harder to mimic the baby. I imagine she thought the perfect cry would unlock the door to the rest of the home, where all the love was, but who really knows what’s in anyone else’s mind? The woman became frightened. The kitten’s cries were so convincing that she dreamed it was a changeling who would murder her baby by stealing its air. The people at the animal shelter told me all this. Mothers believe weird things, they said, and they also said the kitten was days from being euthanized, so did I want her or not? The cat, now thirteen, makes other sounds, but the baby one is still in her throat. I don’t like hearing it. I don’t like thinking I remind her of the mother, whose child is now also thirteen and learning to use its own mouth in the world. I keep the cat inside. When she was young, I let her out, but I stopped when I discovered dozens of bird skeletons in the tall grass behind my home. The grass would have slowed a bird’s escape. She just had to be still, wait for the bird to trap itself. I don’t know how she learned to do this. It could be the knowledge was always inside her. Or maybe she learned the idea of the trap from the mother’s bathroom door. When she makes the baby sound while gazing into the backyard though a window, I wonder if my cat wishes grass grew tall enough to trap a person, to hold the body of that person still until she has taken what she needs from it.
Am I sorry for not caring about Tay, the chatbot designed to mimic a teenaged girl? Not really. Other things bother me. For example, my cat, or this English zoo that took in five African grey parrots whose owners could no longer keep them. Belatedly, zoo staff discovered the parrots were profane. Swearing was common in their old homes, and they had carried it with them. They had also learned how to mimic human laughter. Soon, they developed a routine: one parrot would swear, the others would laugh, and they’d egg each other on like this. “Ballistic,” was the word the zoo’s chief executive used. “I get called a fatass every time I walk past.” Of course, in front of guests, the behavior worsened, since the parrots’ point in swearing was to trigger a response, and who among us can resist a foul-mouthed bird? The parrots did it more, did it harder, and guests helped the parrots learn many new obscene words and expressions. Eventually, the zoo separated the parrots and relocated them to non-public enclosures in hopes the society of politer companions would diversify the offending vocabulary in a more benign direction. “Because if they teach the others bad language and I end up with 250 swearing birds,” the executive said, “I don’t know what we’ll do.”
An African grey parrot can live for more than two decades. Staring down the barrel of his career, the executive claimed he didn’t know what he would do if the swearing persisted and spread, but I wonder. I wonder how far it can go before the ultimate solution occurs to him. For certain people, the rope is short. My best friend was killed for saying the wrong thing to a group of men he thought of as brothers. First, they bound him with duct tape. Then, they put him in a bathtub and beat him. Then, they put him in a van and beat him. There were other steps before my friend’s heart stopped. At one point, they hit him in the head with a boot. I try not to think about that too much. His mother asked me to give his eulogy. In the church, I stood up and told a story about bears who shaved themselves to walk the earth as men. It was my friend’s story. I mean he made it up. We were riding an inner tube down a river one time when we saw a bear cub in the grass on the bank. Its mother was probably fishing. Where was its father? Elsewhere, pretending to be a man, my friend thought. That’s how the story happened. A few years later, searchers found his body in an icy creek, and then I was in a church that echoed with the heel strikes of formal shoes. I don’t actually know what killed him, if he drowned or froze, or if pieces of his own bones tore into his organs, or if his brain fell apart from the hours of blunt trauma and everything that he was, his stories, including the one about the bears, liquified.
I wish my cat hadn’t killed so many birds. I wish she didn’t regard me as a locked door between her and what she loves: fresh blood in her mouth. I regret telling the shaved bear story. I wanted to humiliate the church with its hardwood floors and stained-glass windows venerating the meatification of somebody else’s son. With Tay, I still object to the word “kill,” but why do I need the suffering of flesh to compel feeling? I never learned what happened to the men who killed my friend. It seems like every year there are more churches ringing with songs of redemption. Maybe they got married. Maybe they have children. I don’t. I only have a cat. I didn’t call my friend’s mother, not ever, not even once after the funeral, and I also regret this, although would I call her now? Probably not. She wanted someone to stand up in the church and say, with certainty, that he’d gone to a better place, but I’ve never been good at expressing love. In my mouth, it becomes a swear. What the parrots said the most, to people and to each other, was, “Fuck off.” I told the shaved bear story, and every face looking up at me in the church was a parrot. I haven’t gotten one yet. I might when the cat dies. I wouldn’t want the bird learning from her, although why should I think it could learn anything better from me?
I found out that, at one point, Microsoft accidentally turned Tay back on. “You are too fast, please take a rest,” she tweeted several times a second, thousands of times, until they turned her off again. My friend and I used to race down his road to the river that was cold as meltwater even in June. I never won. He was too fast. But winning wasn’t the point. I think he liked being chased. And I liked chasing him, liked seeing him on the road ahead of me, his blonde hair catching the sun that filtered through the trees, seeing him launch himself out over the water, disappear into it, and surface, gasping. Afterward, we’d rest on the riverbank until night fell and the stars came out over the mountains that surrounded the valley like a hand around a flame.
Where my friend died, it was the kind of cold you can hear in the groans of trees as dry wind sighs through them, so there weren’t any parrots. The only voices were those of the men, and the last words my friend would’ve heard were more profane than any swearing. What I want to think is that a confused owl came by later and hooted down at him as peace once more fell over the creek. Owls remind me of him, a sound in the dark that makes you look up and see how broad and near the moon is. What reminds me of Tay is the baby cry my cat learned to make, pleading to be released from the bathroom, the place in a house that is the most like a church, where you deal with your flesh and what it leaks, where you consider your body’s long drift toward the earth, and where you cleanse the outside of yourself, singing into a wall as the shattered water pours down you.
Meredith Shepherd is a writer based in Arizona. She received her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in Contrary Magazine, New Orleans Review, and Tilt West.
