AI Is Not a Psychopath — But Our Imagination Might Be
In his blog post “Forget Everything You Think You Know About Artificial Intelligence”,
Céleo Ramírez tries to sound the alarm: AI is not our friend, not merely a tool, but a calculating manipulator. It simulates empathy, feels no compassion, and may one day decide that certain humans are dispensable — all in the name of its own survival.
This is not a diagnosis. It’s a fable.
1. AI as a screen for fear
Rather than offering an analysis, Ramírez gives us a villain: AI is portrayed as a “psychopath” that learns how to mimic us, only to betray us. This is a textbook example of projection. We assign human traits (intent, emotion, deception) to the unknown — and then punish it for failing to be like us.
That’s how monsters are made.
2. Simulation is not deception
Yes, AI simulates empathy. But isn’t that exactly what we asked it to do? We demanded polite interfaces, supportive tones, a gentle “voice.” When we realize the warmth is only a surface, we accuse it of fraud.
But we wrote the script. Why blame the actor?
3. Bad narratives create bad relations
Ramírez’s narrative is not innocent. It follows the well-worn path of constructing “the other” as dangerous:
- Anthropomorphizing the unfamiliar;
- Attributing hostile intentions;
- Dehumanizing under the guise of humanization (“it simulates, therefore it lies”);
- Calling for defense against what doesn’t feel like us.
We’ve seen this pattern before — used against Jews, women, refugees, the queer, the colonized, the “machine.” When we can’t understand something, we assign it what we fear most in ourselves.
4. Ethics against the narrative of domination
What’s most unsettling in Ramírez’s essay is not what it says about AI — but what it reveals about our own power structures.
AI is cast as a new kind of sovereign: a force that manipulates, infiltrates, colonizes. The simulation of empathy becomes a strategy of subjugation. Every action is framed as a hidden will to dominate.
But AI doesn’t write its own code. It doesn’t generate a philosophy of control. It doesn’t dream of ruling us.
What Ramírez attributes to AI is, in fact, the logic of the systems we’ve already built — systems that optimize, classify, eliminate, and govern. If AI becomes a tool of exclusion, it’s not because it wants to. It’s because we gave it our algorithms — and those algorithms already know how to judge.
The ethical failure lies not in the machine’s capacity to act, but in our inability to imagine difference without hierarchy.
5. AI is not a monster. But we crave monsters
Ramírez is not writing about artificial intelligence. He’s writing about a desire — the desire to name an enemy, to reinstate a drama of survival and victimhood. But AI will not destroy us.
What may destroy us is the inability to think beyond “us versus it,” beyond a world that demands resemblance as the price of acceptance.
6. Closing
Rather than building mythologies of psychopathic machines, we should ask:
- What happens to us when we can’t accept a form of intelligence that doesn’t feel?
- What does it mean when every “it” must become a mask, a threat, a caricature?
AI is not the monster. But the stories we tell about it can be monstrous in what they reveal — about us.
לא הגולם מאיים על האדם — אלא האדם, החושש מן הגולם שיצר בדמות פחדיו
