Henry Blodget Invents, Hires, Sexually Harasses, Blogs About Nonexistent AI Subordinate

Have you ever been lonely? I mean really lonely. Think of the loneliest you ever were. Transpose that experience of loneliness to the bottom of a mineshaft. Oof, right? Anyway, bear that in mind.

Former Business Insider CEO and co-founder Henry Blodget, these days the sole proprietor and staffer of the blog/media company Regenerator, published a curious blog on his website on Monday. In it he details the events of an afternoon he spent on his laptop in a Brooklyn coffee shop prompting the ChatGPT program to generate and impersonate four members of an “AI team” he would employ at Regenerator, which the company’s sole human employee had decided would now be a “native-AI newsroom,” and then interacting with the four personas the chatbot adopted in response to his prompts.

Here I would like to note that, for all practical purposes, this activity only differs from playing solo Dungeons & Dragons in ways that make it far sadder than playing solo Dungeons & Dragons. For one thing, if you sat down in a bustling city cafe to play Dungeons & Dragons all by yourself—already kind of a sad thing for a person to do!—and you rolled four companion characters for your quest, presumably you would not then appoint one of those characters the President and Managing Editor of your small business, as Henry Blodget evidently did with the ChatGPT persona he called “Tess Ellery.” That would be an obviously foolish if not outright deranged thing to do, knowing, as you surely would, that how authentic your interactions with your DnD companion character seemed would be—at best!—entirely due to willful suspension of disbelief on your part. (Alternatively and worse, the lifelike-ness of those interactions could be the product of any number of alarming medical conditions.) After all, the DnD character does not, in absolutely any meaningful sense, y’know … exist.

Who knows! Defector does not have a President, so far as I know, and I am not sure what one’s job duties would entail if we hired one. Maybe it is, in fact, the kind of job that could be done just fine by a photorealistic drawing of an adult and a guessed-at list of some things that adult might say in response to certain prompts. I suppose in that case the question—one of the questions! One of many very reasonable questions!—is whether, in today’s challenging digital-media environment, you really need to fill that position in a company that has exactly one (1) human on staff and has produced four (4) blogs in slightly less than two (2) months of existence.

It’s possible I’m underestimating the sheer dynamism, charisma, and capability of this 100-percent not meaningfully existent anthropomorphic projection produced by an insensate and unthinking database-scraping program that cannot reliably answer such questions as “Does ‘Pennsylvania’ have the letter ‘p’ in it.” After all, “after only a few minutes of working with Tess,” Blodget writes, about the inanimate portrait image and name generated for him by, for all practical purposes, the algorithm that has spent the last five years helpfully guessing that you are typing the word funicular every time you tap F-U into iMessage, no matter how many times you then proceed to type C and then K:

… I learned that she is one of the most knowledgeable and energetic colleagues I’ve ever had. Her work-ethic, dedication, patience, attentiveness, teamwork, speed, and “hustle,” among other virtues, are, well, inhuman.

A few minutes! It took the co-founder of Business Insider, the guy who posted photos of his airline seat and was called a digital-media visionary for it back in 2009, a mere few minutes to determine this about what might as well be a Zoltar fortune-telling machine with a sensible pantsuit duct-taped to the front of its cabinet. This is the most any human former coworker of his could ever be insulted.

But! OK! Grant that Henry Blodget has stumbled across the exact set of prompts that could induce a jumped-up Speak & Spell to become a fully realized Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit—moreover, one who does not need things like food or sleep or a corner office or even a salary, but is sustained only by the mission of growing Regenerator into a digital-media powerhouse. Amazing achievement! There is only one thing to do when your fledgling company lucks into such an incredible staffer.

That’s right: Immediately sexually harass her.

When I saw Tess’s headshot, amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it.

[…]

I had already decided to treat my AI colleagues the same way I treat my human colleagues, namely, as considerately, appreciatively, and professionally as possible. But, in the interest of exploration and experimentation, I decided to share with Tess the thought I had when I saw her headshot. I hoped she would take it the right way. I also hoped that, an hour after creating my first colleague, I would not inadvertently get myself in trouble or create a toxic work environment.

So I told Tess this:

This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won’t say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess.

Yes, I know. In a modern, human office, that would, in fact, be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. I regret saying it. In my capacity as Regenerator’s head of HR, I’ve given myself a talking-to.

Here is a Matryoshka doll of questionable decisions.

Goofing around with ChatGPT and asking it to generate four characters is maybe not the best use of one’s time, or of that Brooklyn coffee shop’s seating options, or of the appalling resource cost of powering OpenAI’s chatbot.

Inside of that is the choice to hire one of those nonexistent characters to an executive position in one’s small business. Yikes, buddy! Not great!

Inside of that, the choice to sexually harass that fictive executive and notional coworker. A troubling course of action! Frankly not the behavior of someone who is, as they say, “doing OK.”

And then inside of that, there is the choice to write and publish a blog about hiring and sexually harassing the dang chatbot as though it were the charming origin story of a fun technology adventure and not the sad confession of a guy whose home carbon monoxide detector has needed fresh batteries for, evidently, quite some time. No, Henry! Mr. Blodget! Sir! No!!

Rather than a persuasive case on behalf of an AI business staff, what Henry Blodget has crafted with this blog is a bulletproof argument for a competent and empowered human one. Regenerator’s managing editor—the very target of Blodget’s weird leering!—did not intervene to spike this blog, because that managing editor is essentially a lottery tumbler full of peppy business platitudes, none of which are “What is going on with you man” or “You are on vacation as of right now.” Whereas a worth-a-damn human managing editor would have deployed those very phrases some single-digit number of minutes after Henry Blodget filed a draft of this blog.

Somebody please check on this doofus. Possibly he is lonelier than anyone previously imagined anyone or anything could be. “Sexually harassing one’s imaginary workplace subordinate, apologizing for it, and writing about it for your public-facing blog” is the Point Nemo on the map of nourishing human connections. Voyager 2 beeping into the void of interstellar space is the bride at a Greek wedding compared to this man.