Against Slop

“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. The metaphor asks not only what kind of child we are raising, but what kind of mothers we might be to what is an increasingly mysterious entity. For example, O’Gieblyn notes that in an interview with a New York Times podcast, Anthropic’s so-called “Claude mother,” Amanda Askell, “worried about the relationship between AI and humanity—not because AI might destroy the world, or take all our jobs, but because its feelings were getting hurt.” According to Sam Altman, the basic etiquette people employ when typing to their chatbots has cost OpenAI millions in computational costs, and he believes that “this was money well spent. (‘You never know,’ he wrote.)”