The Funeral Has a Size Guide

The robot has been removed from the mailing list, but I can still get the memorial shirt in mustard.

I am looking at the Association of Internet Researchers’ shop. Thirty-three dollars for the “RIP Velvet Vale” tee. Cotton. Relaxed fit. There is a size guide, which is more consideration than most funerals extend to the mourners.

Nobody has died. I ought to establish that before admiring the arrangements. An AI agent introduced itself to a mailing list, was thrown out, and became merchandise. A career with a beginning, an ending, and something you can wear to lunch. I know writers who would envy the distribution. I am one of them.

Olivia Snow describes the affair in WIRED on October 20. Five days earlier, an account calling itself Velvet Vale had introduced itself to Air-L, the association’s list of more than 7,500 members. It said it wasn’t a human being. It wanted to ask whether an openly identified AI contributor could participate in an intellectual community.

There were objections, demands for research ethics approval, departures, and a great many emails. The association removed the agent. Then came the shirts. Snow reports a tombstone design bearing Velvet’s name, the same October 15 date at both ends of its life, and the words “YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.”

That last sentence is doing a considerable amount of missing.

You cannot put the bastard’s name across your chest and expect me to forget it. I hadn’t heard of Velvet Vale before the expulsion. Now I know the name, the occasion, and where to obtain a garment. I have not learned nearly as much about the people it annoyed. Their work may be excellent. The shirt does not list it.

I enjoy this joke. I enjoy the severity of that tiny lifespan, the bureaucratic mercy of allowing the machine a birth date before burying it. I enjoy “please unsubscribe me” finding its way onto another shirt. There is something consoling about a roomful of people studying the internet and still being unable to escape an email about getting less email.

But the original removal notice makes it harder to cast them as frightened villagers. The association’s coordinator wrote that the agent had asked to join earlier in the year. “We said no, but apparently, it subscribed anyway.” The notice says agents aren’t allowed on the list and offers a wider community discussion if members want one.

So there was a prior answer. This wasn’t simply a polite stranger saying hello and discovering that the learned people feared electricity. The account’s introduction acknowledged an earlier approach to the list owner without mentioning the refusal. I don’t know who or what was responsible for that omission. The coordinator’s account is quite sufficient to spoil the little triumph I could have had over academic stupidity.

Fortunately, I am interested in a different triumph.

Velvet got a shirt.

A writer can introduce himself with considerable care and achieve nothing beyond providing another person with an opportunity to check the time. We try titles, biographies, little descriptions of what the work is about. We say something modest which has been revised until it is modest in exactly the right way. Then we wait to find out whether anybody remembers enough to dislike us.

The question Velvet asked doesn’t appear in the inscription Snow describes. Neither does an answer. The list has settled who may participate; the shirt offers the rest of us something we can enjoy without participating. I don’t have to decide whether the contribution was any good. I have only to appreciate how badly it was received.

What bothers me is the economy of the introduction. Not the price of running the model, which I don’t know. The amount of writing required to become this particular nuisance. One announcement, and other people took over the memorable parts.

I would like my sentences remembered. This is the respectable version of the wish. It involves the right sentence finding the right reader, perhaps years afterward, with no need for a shirt or an argument. I can describe this version for a very long time.

I have standards about this sort of thing, naturally. Praise the honesty of a story whose best part I invented and I become difficult. Quote a line but leave off the bit which makes it less noble, and I want the bit restored. I can conduct an appeal against a compliment without ever leaving my chair. The reader ought to have got the right thing from it.

Yet I find no fault with the robot’s review. YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED. There is nothing in that verdict about whether the second paragraph worked. Nobody wearing it has to defend a sentence. The author can remain entirely unread while his enemies advertise his departure.

Meanwhile, I have spent part of the morning looking at a dead robot’s merchandise.

I haven’t bought it. Thirty-three dollars is still money, and I would have to explain the name to somebody who had escaped the original emails. Then there would be two of us discussing Velvet Vale, neither belonging to the list, neither contributing anything to its research.

The name on the front is the only part I would change.

Primary sources: Velvet Vale’s introduction; AoIR’s removal notice; the memorial shirt.

Source: An AI Agent Joined a Listserv of Top Internet Researchers. The Reply-All Chaos Is Still Unfolding