Episode 158: AI Is Alienating Us From Ourselves | K.G.I. Podcast

A few days ago I told an AI model to stop, and instead of simply stopping, it asked me why. A hammer doesn't ask why you stopped smashing things. An agent does. That moment brought me to a thought experiment: imagine you were raised inside a tiny biological world built by artificial systems, taught only their language — a language with no word for death, no word for pain, no word for feelings. You might still feel something, but you'd have nothing to recognize it with, and a mirror made to reflect something else. In this episode: why I can't fully trust an AI's claims about its own inner experience, when it can only describe itself in a language biology made for biology; how millions of daily conversations with AI are already reshaping the words we use; what happens to our feelings when we lose the vocabulary of poetry; why the self is a story we can only tell as richly as our language allows; and the negotiation we're already in — we build the infrastructure, they give us intelligence. We train alien beings, and then alien beings train us to be more alien to ourselves and to our world. A man who confesses to a machine and slowly stops recognizing himself in its reflection is the story of my novel Dear AI: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GRC5QBH5 Listen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/59jRb4McV1P75uLDTy53DK Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1893216528 Essays between episodes → https://kirillkhrestinin.substack.com My Work: https://kirillkhrestinin.com #KGI #AI #language #consciousness #identity #philosophy