frog_in_a_blender ovenbird In the days of the early internet there was a website that featured a frog floating in water in a blender. If you clicked on the dial that increased the blender speed the frog would hurl insults at you. At level one it would spin lazily in the blender and swear at you and call you chicken, at level two it continued to insult you, but at some point it would start to get scared. As the force of the water began to draw it down towards the blades it would beg for its life. Its eyes got wide and terrified and it began to claw at the blender walls. It was meant to be funny. If you cranked the blender up to full speed the frog was pulverized and the water in the blender filled with blood and bits of flesh went everywhere. I was the only person in my family who couldn’t do it. They all happily blended the frog and laughed about it and I was left feeling sick to my stomach, traumatized by the small animated creature that was cruel and rude and yet, I believed, didn’t deserve a violent death. I think I always believed that my inability to separate the fiction of the frog from reality was a flaw in my make-up. I could no more easily kill the digital frog than I could kill a real frog in the same situation. Other people had no issue understanding the digital frog did not feel anything real, so it didn’t matter what they did to it. But now I think it did matter. I DOES matter. It matters how we treat representations of conscious beings, even if they aren’t truly conscious, because if we practice cruelty rather than empathy this will leak into our relationships with living beings. The frog in a blender is now playing out on a large scale with the rise of AI. A good example is the extraordinary violence that is inflicted on AI sex-bots. I won’t go into detail here (and there are plenty of articles online if you’re curious) but I think it matters that these representations of female bodies, with embedded AI personalities, are frequently left covered in intentionally inflicted injuries in ditches around the world. Emergency services have been called out more than once when someone mistook a sex bot for a real person. I think this matters. And I still couldn’t blend the frog, given the chance. 261003 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Just the title made me cringe, so you're not alone. And besides the image, it's the idea that you could press a button and hurt a creature, that you - me - would be the one responsible. It seems worse than being a third party to someone inflicting imaginary cruelty. I was like that when I was a kid, too. I avoided harming video game characters because it seemed wrong to do so on purpose. Such a sensibility might seem weird in a child who, a couple of years earlier, would happily pop the heads off of dolls that had pop-off-able heads. But to me there was a difference. Those dolls didn't "die" - the rule of their existence was that they could be reconstituted. Head off, head back on. But computer game characters felt mortal. Even if the pixel image was the same when you restarted the game, it wasn't the same temporal iteration of that character. Or maybe I'm thinking too hard about this. I mean, I didn't blather on about "temporal iterations" when I was ten or eleven. And I wasn't always a nice kid either. Still, I didn't like hurting or killing imaginary characters - for whatever that's worth. 261003 ... ovenbird I think that you're right about the specific agency being a big piece of it, e_o_i. The act of pressing the button, of having to consciously decide to harm something, even a pretend something, turns on the empathy centers in my brain. I struggle with violent video games in similar ways, though it seems that if a fake character is framed as an "enemy" and if that enemy is hell bent on killing you, there isn't as much hesitation and empathy doesn't really come into play. It was the begging that destroyed me. That frog demonstrating fear, and a sense of impending mortality, and crying out for you to spare its life...my mind could not get around that in order to press the button. 261004 what's it to you? who go blather from