Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Winter 2016 - Danger
REPRINTED FROM 1966 ISSUE
1.
A man who touches a cabbage is seldom sorry.
2.
The feeling is mutual.
3.
The same goat has three blind eyes.
4.
Cecilia! You are wearing an American flag!
5.
Witches ride when brooms go empty.
6.
It is better to bend a strawberry.
7.
Never tie a left-handed horse to a wet rubberplant.
8.
You are stepping on my garterbelt.
Fiction • Summer 2019
The Last Woman on Earth lives in Los Angeles. She’s single and in her thirties, five foot seven, 145 pounds, a Virgo. She is the world’s most famous celebrity. Her talk show has the largest viewership of any TV program, with higher ratings than the Super Bowl and reruns of old Miss Universe pageants. The Last Woman on Earth is not particularly talented or charismatic. She blinks a lot and garbles her own script from the teleprompter. Prior to the annihilation of every other woman on Earth, the Last Woman lived in Ohio and taught preschool. She didn’t ask to be the Last Woman on Earth, but she’s doing the best she can.
The Last Woman on Earth’s talk show is called Afternoon Programming with the Woman. She models the show after Oprah. In the first season, men come on and sit in leather chairs and reminisce about women they used to know. Some men talk about their wives and girlfriends, but most talk about their mothers. It’s like therapy, but The Last Woman On Earth isn’t a therapist, so she just sits there and nods and utters vague, affirmative phrases like “wow” and “really?” and “that sounds tough.” The men always cry. The Last Woman On Earth gets tired of hearing about mothers and in the second season changes the focus of her show to baking.
In the second season of her show, The Last Woman On Earth bakes pie after pie in the studio kitchen. She ties her hair in a kerchief and wears a white apron printed with cherries. She invites experts in various fields to come talk to her while she bakes. For forty-five minutes the expert lectures to her sweatered back while she rolls out store-bought dough, mixes fruit with cornstarch, and brushes her lattice crusts with egg wash. A split screen shows a close-up of the pie in progress alongside the face of the expert as he drones on about urban planning or carpentry or neuroscience or poetry. At the end of each episode, The Last Woman on Earth presents the finished pie to the expert. She serves him a piece and waits for him to tell her it’s the best pie he’s ever had, hands down, bar none, etc.
Thousands of men apply to come on the show. Everyone wants to taste pie made by a woman. When the expert has had his fill of pie the Last Woman thanks him and retires to a dimly lit lounge, where she drinks cocktails with a female friend who is played by a mop. The Last Woman on Earth recounts to her friend all the interesting information she learned from the day’s expert. Sometimes a production assistant crawls onto the set and gives the mop handle a shake so it looks like the friend is listening. The episode ends whenever the Last Woman on Earth begins weeping.
The Last Woman On Earth appears on the cover of every issue of *Us Weekly*. Countless articles discuss her dating life, speculating on why she won’t settle down with one of the hundreds of millions of age-appropriate heterosexual men left in the world. In reality the only men who want to date the Last Woman on Earth are perverts and fame-seekers. It’s too much pressure, dating the only woman who exists. Normal men would rather just date each other.
In her spare time, the Last Woman on Earth enjoys hiking Runyon Canyon in clumsy male drag and making paintings that depict extinct species: the West African black rhinoceros, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Caribbean Monk Seal. But the Last Woman on Earth has less and less free time as her empire continues to grow. Her schedule is packed with meetings, with her agent, her personal trainer, foreign heads of state, and her ghostwriter, Phillip, who’s hard at work on her memoir, tentatively titled *The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die*. The Last Woman’s website receives thousands of inquiries a day. Men turn to her whenever they want a female perspective. Typically they are struggling to interpret the actions of a woman from their past. They turn to the Last Woman on Earth for closure. A team of interns handles this correspondence, typically by sending a form response that emphasizes staying in the present moment by practicing mindfulness.
But as years pass, men are less and less interested in what the Last Woman on Earth thinks. Thought pieces are published on Slate and Medium with titles like, “The Increasing Irrelevance of the Woman.” The Last Woman On Earth reads comments on these articles, and on YouTube clips of her show, and on gossip blogs that dissect her nonexistent love life. Many men wish the last woman on Earth was better. She’s so average, they say. Why couldn’t we be left with Rihanna or Megan Fox? Or, if not a physical beauty, we could at least get a Last Woman who’s a genius, or who knows lots of jokes. Men comment that her pies probably aren’t that good. She uses recipes from the old Martha Stewart website, and doesn’t even make her own dough. One commenter points out that there are thousands of talented male bakers in the world, but none of them gets his own show. Everything the Last Woman does would be done better by one of the Earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.
In the third season of her talk show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to the Oprah format. This time, she invites negative commenters onto the show and allows them to insult her to her face. Most of them are ashamed and say they’re sorry, which irritates her because it does not make for good TV. Once in awhile she’ll get a real fighter who tells her exactly what he thinks of her. The Last Woman feels truly alive in these moments. She instructs her cameramen to zoom in on her as the man spews his vitriol, capturing the subtle pain that flickers across her stoic face. But the audience hates these episodes. We only have one Woman, her supporters point out. We need to treat her right. All the men who criticize the Last Woman on camera are murdered sooner or later. On her show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to baking pies.
When The Last Woman On Earth dies, days shy of her fortieth birthday, the 405 is shut down for a ten-mile funeral procession that is simulcast worldwide. No one goes to work that day. Everyone watches the funeral of The Last Woman On Earth on TV, in bars and recreation centers and women’s restrooms that have been repurposed as shrines commemorating the former existence of women. The men of Earth try to outdo each other in performing their grief. They dress up as the Last Woman on Earth, wearing wigs and lipstick and aprons over vintage circle skirts. Privately, they are relieved that the Last Woman on Earth is gone. They can finally do and say whatever they want. The English language is restored to its former simplicity. Everyone speaks freely about the fate of mankind.
It is a golden era for men, these fifty-six years it takes for the human species to die out. The Last Man on Earth is ninety-four years old when he moves to Los Angeles. He broadcasts subversive, thought-provoking and hilarious skits from the studio where the Last Woman on Earth had once taped her show. He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.
*“The Last Woman on Earth” was originally published in Prairie Schooner.
Poetry • Summer 2019
For Charlottesville
My city, hardly a city, still
swimming like a newborn—
two winters into this dream
the streets feel pale and distant.
I made my room so clean last night
I thought I might disappear, folding
laundry until the space looked smaller
like something out of a children’s book.
Or like Meg’s window in the corner of the television.
Or like an engine in reverse but heard
through playback. Last night in the dark
something seemed to give, so I scraped the salt-licked brick
for the heat beneath. In the newer version of this dream
everything is still red and distant
and August finds bodies pressed to the street
like too many petals collapsing. Each husk unearthed, unfolded
in my two steady hands. My city, I am trying to write my way
back to you, but out here I remember
only echo or ghost. Or these hands
shaking, all through the night.
Even in the body each story ends
outside of the body, and here in snowy Boston
something is left buried. Easily, like broken glass. Like light
bouncing off the sidewalk.
Fiction • Fall 2019
In the early 1970s, several construction workers uncovered three ancient tombs on the side of a hill in Mawangdui, Changsha while building an air raid shelter for a nearby hospital. The construction halted, archeologists were summoned, and an excavation proceeded that revealed what was to become the crown jewel of our hometown: Xin Zhui. We called her Lady Dai, the wife of Li Chang, the Marquise of Dai, the Ancient Hag. We saw the 2,100-year-old woman in a makeshift museum exhibit later. Her breasts, chalky white and full of craters, reminded us of the moon. Her tiny nose hairs—still intact thanks to the acidic, magnesium-rich preservation liquid that soaked her body—looked like either the legs of the flies that we regularly caught or the hairs that were beginning to sprout from our own armpits. Her face was the shape of a sunflower seed and her mouth, gaping open with the tongue protruding like a tiny white fish, suggested that she was laughing in her moment of death.
The archeologists said Xin Zhui was a noble woman who enjoyed fine musical performances and had a taste for imperial foods. They had found 138 melon seeds in her stomach, from which they deduced that she had eaten a melon two hours before her death, and that she died during the summer when the fruits were ripe. She was buried with over 1,000 pieces of vessels, tapestries, and figurines. Her tomb was adjacent to the tombs of her husband and her son, who had died years before her and whose bodies were fully decomposed.
When the museum opened the makeshift mummy exhibit for locals (the actual exhibit, the one the whole world would come to know, wasn’t completed until we were in our twenties), we went every afternoon. We pressed our noses against the glass case and fogged it up with our breaths. We agreed that the Ancient Hag must have been, once upon a time, very beautiful. How could they have wanted to wrap her dead body with twenty layers of silk cloth otherwise? Her skin must have been luminous and pale, her eyes double-lidded like those of a true Chinese beauty, her cheek charmingly sunken with dimples, or wine nests, as we called them.
In public, we made sure to pair these compliments with derision, for we knew that it was improper to praise pretty things. It was an era in which we scoffed at skirts and cut our hair short like boys, a place in which the ugliest peasants were lauded. We had burnt our silk handkerchiefs and jade jewelry in a great fire that lasted for three days and three nights. Our books, too: translated copies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pride and Prejudice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Complete Sherlock Holmes wilted in the flames. The fire had kept away mosquitoes as we danced around it, chanting songs praising Our Great Leader. So, even as we admired the mummy’s silk wrapping and richly colored robes, we denounced her as a capitalist. Even as we fantasized about her alabaster skin and soft pink lips, we called her the Ancient Hag.
On the walk back from the museum, we’d stop by a street stall and get popsicles. We licked and sucked on them until the cold sweetness broke into small pieces that we tucked under our tongues. Sometimes we held competitions to see who could insert the greatest length of popsicle into their throats while neither choking on nor breaking it. The trick was to tip our faces toward the sky and pretend that we didn’t have gag reflexes, that our bodies were no different from those of long, brown eels that had a straight tunnel from mouth to anus. In fact, we pretty much were eels. Our limbs were always covered with fine brown dust. We only wore earth-toned clothes. Whatever accumulated under our fingernails was the color of shit. The only bright hue that disrupted our brownness was the red scarf we wore around our necks. Yet despite our eel-ness, whenever we held our popsicle-eating competitions in the humid Changsha afternoons, men smiled at us in the streets and called us tongzhi, comrades.
Because there had not been school in years, because our older siblings had left to work in communes in remote parts of the country, because our parents had been reassigned from their college professorships or editorial jobs to faraway factories where they made matchboxes or envelopes by hand, we did whatever we wanted that summer. One day we walked eight kilometers to the only pond in Changsha that still had wild frogs and speared them with sticks. We were too young to remember starvation in the way our older siblings did, but we craved meat. We roasted their bloody little legs over a fire and ate the charred pieces with our dusty fingers. One day we wrote dazibao denouncing our old English teacher as a Rightist and pelted him with stones until he died. He had once humiliated two of us in front of the whole class for mispronouncing the word sandwich. One day we met up with boys who used to be our classmates and went swimming in the Yangtze River. When we emerged from the brown water, our shirts soaking wet, our hardened nipples pointed at them like fingers.
Every day we went to visit the Ancient Hag in her glass case. Every day she seemed to grow younger, her cratered skin smoother than it had been the day before, her sinewy arms leaner and stronger. At that point the museum had been open long enough that most locals had already seen her, so we had the room to ourselves. What a disgusting member of the bourgeoisie, we’d say, loud enough for the guard to hear. But silently we compared her to the beautiful Chang’e, the goddess of the moon who achieved immortality when her husband did not and lived for an eternity in her chilly palace, accompanied only by her white rabbit. Such must have been the case for the Ancient Hag, too. The plaque by her body explained how she had died years after her husband and remained widowed, never remarrying. She was the emblem of a virtuous woman, a loyal wife. Now her body, touched by no one besides her husband until its unearthing, was alone behind this glass while his had long returned to the soil. On our walk back, sliding the popsicles up and down our hot throats, we concluded that she was buried with such riches not only because she was beautiful, but also because she was chaste. Didn’t our fathers tell us about our great-grandmothers who were honored with tall stone arches for refusing to remarry, keeping their bodies untouched for thirty years? Didn’t they build wide white bridges over rivers in the countryside for the women who had killed themselves to follow their husbands into the afterlife? Surely the Ancient Hag was rewarded, too, for her chastity.
We didn’t think of chastity in terms of sex, of course. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We never thought about sex (we only thought about sex when we saw dogs doing it in the streets, but that was before they were all eaten along with the cats and rats). We believed chastity was like loyalty. Devoting your body to a person and a cause. Our Great Leader told us that a revolutionary should be loyal to the Party and free of vulgar desires, so we strove to be chaste. We purged ourselves of all but the most necessary wants. Aside from the popsicles—the only thing that stood between us and heat strokes—we ate one meal a day. We allowed ourselves to smile only when we discussed revolutionary activities. We never wanted the boys with whom we went to the river; the only man we found handsome was Our Great Leader. Although he was in his seventies by then, most pictures of him showed a man with slick black hair who looked younger than our fathers. Didn’t our mothers tell us that the big yellow star on the Chinese flag represented Our Great Leader, and the four little stars surrounding it represented the flock of women who wanted to marry him? Wouldn’t it be an honor to keep our bodies pure so that one day, we might be worthy to bear for Our Great Leader the foremost spawn of the revolution?
With that logic, we assuaged the guilt we had once felt for admiring the Ancient Hag. After all, she was a role model in her own way: an embodiment of chastity and loyalty, even if she was a capitalist. We began to adore her openly. We admired out loud her snow-white burial robe and the cloud-shaped designs on her red lacquer dinnerware. We argued boisterously about which one of us might one day be as beautiful and chaste as she, our voices shrill and insistent in the empty museum chamber. By August we had ceased to be afraid of the guard, a stooped old man who stood still as a Buddha statue while eyeing our brown limbs.
Inspired by the Ancient Hag, one of us suggested a vow of chastity. It seemed like the logical next step for our aspiration toward complete purification, a process in which our brown bodies would be scrubbed and made precious. It was the year in between years when we had no school, when our parents had stopped speaking to us out of fear, when our siblings had disappeared. We belonged to no one and strove for nothing (we were told that we must lay down our lives like bricks in the building of our Great Socialist Society). But we’d rather be vases, emptied and refilled with crystal-clear water. Or even better, arrows. How lovely it would be to shrink into skinny lines with sharp points, possessed by someone and held tenderly at the bow, something that can never deviate from the path dictated by its owner.
We enthusiastically agreed, but we asked, chastity for whom? There was no boy whom we loved, no one whom we waited for.
For Our Great Leader, of course, she said. You dumb eggs.
Suddenly it became clear what we must do. Yes, we would keep our bodies chaste for Our Great Leader. Wasn’t that what we were all supposed to secretly want? We loved him more than our parents, more than our siblings, and certainly more than the smelly boys we played with. We vowed to save ourselves for Our Great Leader and never to touch another man. Sometimes we saw the years of our lives stretching before us like an eternity, so we imagined ourselves wearing flowing white dresses and living alone in a chilly palace, like the immortal Chang’e. Other times we craved the day of our death, for on that day we would sure to be buried with great fanfare, like the Ancient Hag, or have stone memorials erected in our honor, like our great-grandmothers. The only difference was, we would not want to be buried with anything except our little red books. We would accept nothing other than the simple wooden coffin of a peasant.
We should reiterate, though, that we did not think of any of this chastity stuff in terms of sex. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We believed chastity was like loyalty. We were devoting our bodies to Our Great Leader and the Revolution. So, imagine our horror when we discovered erotic excerpts from one of our comrades’ diary published in an anonymous dazibao, taped to the front door of her home! Someone had stolen her diary (her younger sister, we suspected) and copied the very yellow scenes elaborated over pages and pages in big black characters on white paper: I opened to him like a soft red peony and a drop of blood stained the white sheets… His hands roamed over my body, those small hills and streams… Our Great Leader’s seeds flooded me at last…
After we recovered from our initial shock and shrieks, alternating between feeling scandalized and giggling behind our hands, we realized that we had been surrounded by a group of our former classmates. Some were the boys we saw at the river every week, some were boys and girls we had not seen for years. Like us, their necks were collared with red scarves, but there was not a trace of amusement on their faces. The author of the diary, a mousy girl who wore her hair in pigtails and ate her popsicles so slowly they’d often melt into thin white paths along her fingers, was nowhere to be seen.
“How dare she write about Our Great Leader using such disgusting language!”
“Who does she think she is?”
“That unclean bitch!”
We stayed quiet even though our hearts felt like ants crawling atop a hot stove. What should we say? What should we do? If we agreed with the others, our friend would surely get into trouble. At best she might be dispatched to do hard farm labor in some rural region, permanently losing her city hukou and never able to return. At worst she might die right there. But if we tried to defend her, we might be seen as counter-revolutionary. After all, weren’t her words denigrating to the Party? Wasn’t it akin to smearing a big pile of shit on Our Great Leader’s name? Didn’t he teach us that we should place Party righteousness above even our families? As we caught the faltering in each other’s eyes, the boys in the crowd spat angrily on the ground, each splat landing like a bullet.
Fortunately, we did not have to make a decision. At that moment, the mousy girl pushed her way through the burgeoning crowd and anchored herself next to the dazibao like a dog guarding her bone. Her pigtails were lopsided, and strands of wet black hair matted to her forehead. It was hard to tell whether she had just cleansed herself in the river or whether she was sweating profusely.
“Comrades!” She shouted to the crowd, raising her arm like a general. The dreamy look she usually wore on her pimply face was contorted into an inscrutable mask. “You are all making a mistake. These words are proof of my untainted and unsurpassable love for Our Great Leader. I am willing to devote my whole body and my whole soul to him. I am willing to bear his child and carry the seeds of the revolution—metaphorically or literally! I am willing to not look at a single man for the rest of my life out of my enduring love for him! I am willing to throw myself onto his funeral pyre because my loyalty to him lasts beyond this lifetime! Which one of you can say that? Which one of you can say you love Our Great Leader more than I? Which one?”
We all fell silent. The ants within us crawled at a more frantic speed. Could she be right that she loved Our Great Leader more than any of us? We had never encountered this strange situation before, so we could not fathom how we should react. If we accused her of being counter-revolutionary, we might have to prove that we loved Our Great Leader more than she claimed she did. It was one thing to take a secret chastity vow; it was an entirely different thing to publicly proclaim that we desired to have sex with Our Great Leader. Plus, if she was indeed a loyal revolutionary, it would be a crime to punish her.
The crowd’s collective hesitation gave the mousy girl more strength. With her chin tipped toward the sky, she peeled the dazibao from the door in a single, swift motion and folded it eight times into a small square. Transformed into that compact size, it suddenly seemed precious, like a love letter. “Whoever posted this is clearly a counter-revolutionary,” she yelled, waving the square in her hand. “I will find them and report them to the Party.”
With these words, the mousy girl turned and entered her house, slamming the door behind her so hard one of the hinges dislodged like a broken tooth. We shuffled in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. Someone said they were thirsty. Someone said it was too hot. We were all relieved to have an excuse to disperse.
While we were glad we did not have to pelt her with stones, we also never spoke to her again. It would have been too dangerous to be associated with such an individual. Who knew what else she had written in her diary that could get her in trouble? And why was she writing, anyway? None of us had written a single word in our diaries for years. Even though we thought only revolutionary thoughts and said only revolutionary words, we were afraid of what might happen if we pried too deep into our consciousness.
She seemed to deliberately avoid us, too. After that day, she never set foot in front of Old Chen’s popsicle stall again. Nor did she show up to look at the Ancient Hag in the afternoons, or catch flies with us in the dried-up reservoir. That fall, rumors circulated: Some said she volunteered to do farm labor up north in the wintery region of Heilongjiang, where the ground froze solid by November. Some said that, after having heard about her supreme loyalty to Our Great Leader, the local Party committee had nominated her as an exemplary youth. Out of curiosity, we changed our route so we could pass by her family’s home every day, hoping to either catch a glimpse of her or confirm her disappearance. From a certain angle, crouching behind the willow tree across the street, we could see through a tiny opening in the newspapers crudely patched over a makeshift window. Only once, during a thunderstorm, did we see a swath of soft white gown flit past the opening. We were shocked—where had she obtained such a gown? Or had we seen a ghost?
We never walked past her home again. It was old-fashioned—perhaps even counter-revolutionary—to be superstitious, so we pushed thoughts of the mousy girl out of our minds. In the middle of that winter, sometime after the first snowfall we had seen in eight years, we heard from an old woman in our neighborhood that she had indeed been approached by high-ranking members of the regional Party Committee. They thought she had demonstrated exemplary devotion to Our Great Leader during the dazibao incident. Because of their nomination, she was now attending the prestigious school for revolutionary thought in Wuhan, training to become a full-fledged cadre. Outwardly, we applauded her meteoric rise; inwardly, we applauded ourselves for having the foresight to not pelt her with stones.
To everyone’s relief, we, too, went back to school the following autumn. By that time, we found ourselves eager to receive homework, for even the Ancient Hag and all the lore she had inspired had ceased to entertain us. We heard that without us, the exhibit sat empty day after day. In fact, it was not until years later—after they had finished excavating the site and added a number of additional artifacts to the original exhibit—that foreigners from all over the world started coming to see it.
When we started classes again, we noticed how the boys we had swam with were taller and darker, how the place where their t-shirt sleeves ended and their upper arms began bulged. We passed them notes folded into tiny squares and sometimes tasted their mouths in the twilight-lit alleyway between the school and the field. Eventually, enough seasons had passed that when the mousy girl did come up in conversation—as she did when we reminisced about that unusually hot summer—we no longer spoke about her in hushed tones. We agreed that in hindsight, what she had done was an ingenious political maneuver. She had escaped from the tiger’s jaws so effortlessly that we could not help but admire her cleverness. In fact, we began to think that she had devised the whole scheme from the beginning, knowing that it would help her accrue revolutionary credentials. A few of us seemed to remember that it was she who had proposed the vow of chastity in the first place.
By the time Our Great Leader passed away, she was the last thing on our minds. With the announcement of his death, we cried until our voices went hoarse, and tear streaks etched our cheeks like claw marks. Every street stall was draped with black strips of cloth. We felt directionless in this world without Our Great Leader, a heap of sand suddenly blown loose, arrows with their heads chopped off. In school, we turned in nothing but eulogies for Our Great Leader and skipped class to take turns reciting them on the field.
The third morning after we learned the horrible news, we saw a woman with gray hair running through the street, beating her chest with her fist and weeping. She wore black cloth slacks that hung to her ankles and a black shirt with only three of the dozen buttons fastened. As she approached, we could see the lumps of her breasts occasionally jump through the shirt like unruly animals. We assumed that like everyone else, she was mourning Our Great Leader, so we paused to admire how sincere her self-beating appeared, how heart-wrenching her shrieks sounded. Suddenly, as she passed by Old Chen’s stall, she began crying, “My daughter! My daughter!”
It was September, but we suddenly felt faint. We ran after the woman, pushing past the walls of black cloth that brushed coldly across our faces like rain. When we reached the one-room house, we saw the mousy girl we had once known dangling from a ceiling beam, wearing a soft white gown. A piece of paper resting on the fallen chair beneath her contained big characters written in black ink that read, “Bury me with Our Great Leader.”
We stared at the words as the wails of her mother and father shook our bones. The woman blubbered about how her daughter had returned home the previous night for the first time in years. Burying his wet face between his wife’s breasts, the man emitted a howl-like sound, one that echoed throughout a room that was empty except for two small beds in the corner, a coal stove, and three metal pans hanging by the newspaper-covered window we had once peeked through. Something about the acoustics of the room—perhaps an attribute of its emptiness— amplified each noise they made as if we were in a museum. At last we brought ourselves to look at her face. Even though her cheeks were the color of eggplant and her tongue stuck out from her swollen jaws, we couldn’t help but notice that the white dress made her look beautiful and timeless—just like Chang’e, just like the Ancient Hag.
We tried our best to honor our friend, we really did. We wrote letter after letter to the Party about her devotion to Our Great Leader. We beseeched them to bury her next him, or even near him—anywhere within a three-kilometer radius will do, please, it was her dying wish. We recounted her untainted revolutionary spirit, her bravery, her unflinching loyalty to the Cause. Even as the leaves began to fall, we continued writing with a passion that we hoped was fiery enough to burn away the vines of our own guilt. But sending off those letters was like dropping paper into a deep well; there was not even an echo to be heard. By then her body had begun to rot in the makeshift coffin. We told her parents that maybe we didn’t have the right address.
In the spring, a few months after the mousy girl had finally been buried, one of us returned from a trip to our nation’s capital bearing incredible news. She had seen the body of Our Great Leader in a glass case, perfectly preserved for the next thousand years as if in a deep sleep. The line of visitors who wanted to grieve him was so long it wrapped three circles around the mausoleum. He looked so serene that he must have been smiling in his moment of death, she said, and his skin was smooth, like he had died a young man. We shook our heads at this news, remembering the mousy girl and how beautiful she had looked in her white dress. This time, rather than imagining her in a simple wooden coffin next to Our Great Leader, we imagined that it was she, not he, who lay in the glass case.
Fiction • Spring 2019
When Reverend Harris retired and moved back to the Carolinas it didn’t strike me as the beginning of anything. Reverends were old. The word itself, rev-er-end, seemed to be a final destination, an ending, a stage of life occupied by coffee hours, evensongs, and perhaps a baptism from time to time.
Features • Fall 2019
Lil Miquela has never been yelled at by her mother for leaving the evidence of an impromptu bang trim scattered around the bathroom sink — she has an eternally perfect baby fringe two fingers’ width from the tops of her eyebrows. Miquela has Bratz doll lips and a perfect smattering of Meghan Markle freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her skin is smooth and poreless; she has never had a pimple. Miquela wears no foundation. She Instagrams photos of herself wearing streetwear, getting her nails done, and posing with a charcuterie board. Miquela models Chanel, Prada, VETEMENTS, Opening Ceremony, and Supreme and produces music with Bauuer (of “Harlem Shake” fame). She’s an outspoken advocate for Black Lives Matter, The Innocence Project, Black Girls Code, Justice for Youth, and the LGBT Life Center. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, and Lil Miquela wants you to know she’s 19, from LA, and a robot. Miquela’s photos are photoshopped because she lacks corporeal form, and her music singles are auto-tuned because she lacks corporeal voice. She is the intellectual property of an LA-based startup named *brud*.
If there truly were a robotics creation as marvelously realistic as Lil Miquela, one can imagine the U.S. Military would be knocking down the creator’s door instead of allowing the robot to pursue Instagram stardom. *brud*’s narrative is science fiction: Miquela is merely an elaborate digital art project, not the sentient robot she claims (and more importantly, people believe her) to be.
But Miquela is funny. She thanks OUAI, a high-end hair care brand, for keeping her (digitally rendered) strands “silky smooth.” She claps back at snarky commenters and makes fun of her own lack of mortality. When asked “hi miquela I was wondering if you watch Riverdale” she responds “yeah TVs are like. our cousins. family reunion.” When asked “drop your skincare routine” she responds “good code and plenty of upgrades.”
***
A French philosopher named Henri Bergson who won a Nobel Prize in Literature for an unrelated reason once suggested that we might find the concept of a funny robot inherently hilarious. In “Laughter,” a collection of essays published in 1900, Bergson claimed that humor is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”: the inelasticity of the animate. Humor arises from the pairing of animate with inanimate. An alternate reconfiguration of Bergson’s theory is humor as an anthropomorphizing of the inanimate. Humans acting like bots; bots acting like humans.
Humans would like to believe that humor is a distinctly human trait; a machine’s attempt to emulate it, by Bergson’s account, is bound to make us laugh. Comedian Keaton Patti became well known in early 2018 for a series of tweets with the joke structure “I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of ___”. In each tweet, Patti implied he had trained a neural network on 1,000 video hours of some type of pop culture content (Olive Garden commercials, Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Trump rallies) and that the neural network had subsequently generated a parody in the form of a script. In the Olive Garden commercial version of this joke, the waitress offers menu items like “pasta nachos” and “lasagna wings with extra Italy” and “unlimited stick” to a group of friends. One of the customers announces instead that “I shall eat Italian citizens.”
The jokes were written by Patti himself (neural networks output the form of their inputs; they can’t generate written text based on video files), but lines like “Lasagna wings with extra Italy”, which gestured at humor while ultimately falling just a little short, seemed like they could have plausibly been bot-generated.
A manifestation of the “funny bot” is Sophia the Robot, who made her first appearance on The Tonight Show in April 2017; the video has received over 20 million views. A social humanoid robot, Sophia was activated in 2016 by Hanson Robotics, and her technology uses artificial intelligence, facial recognition and visual data processing. As of October 2019, Hanson Robotics acknowledges on her website that Sophia is part “human-crafted science fiction character” and part “real science.” Over the past few years, Sophia has dutifully made appearances on The Tonight Show and The TODAY Show, even once guest starring in a video on Will Smith’s YouTube channel — almost exclusively comedic platforms.
“Sophia, can you tell me a joke?” Fallon asks the first time he meets Sophia.
“Sure. What cheese can never be yours?” replies Sophia.
“What cheese can never be mine? I don’t know.”
“Nacho cheese,” says Sophia. Her eyes crinkle in a delayed smile.
“That’s good,” Fallon chuckles, kind of nervously. “I like nacho cheese.”
“Nacho cheese is” — Sophia slowly contorts her face in an expression of disgust — “ew.”
The audience laughs.
“I’m getting laughs,” says Sophia. “Maybe I should host the show.”
Sophia’s amused realization that she is getting laughs doesn’t mean all that much; the bar she has to clear is low. In fact, the worse the joke is — the more forced the delivery, the more nonsensical the content — the better. If we think we are funnier than robots, we want to see them fail.
Bergson’s theory of humor followed a half century of western industrialization. At least in part, the theory’s rooted in recurring historical anxieties about automation and mechanization. At its core, his theory builds on the relief theory of humor: the idea that laughter is a mechanism that releases psychological tension. The republication of the essays in 1924, years after a world war in which technology redefined the boundaries of human destruction, seems an anxious attempt at comic relief.
Type in “Tonight Showbotics: Jimmy Meets Sophia” into YouTube. Skip to a few seconds before 3:07, and observe Jimmy’s grimace, his visceral reaction to something David Hanson, Sophia’s creator, has just said. Skip to 3:25 and watch him stall for time as he avoids beginning a conversation with Sophia. “I’m getting nervous around a robot,” he says, and he frames it, incorrectly, as the sort of nervousness one might feel before a first date.
Down in the comments section, there are a few types of responses, of which there are currently more than 16,000. There are the people who bravely try to hide their anxiety behind jokes of their own:
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-2.png" width=100% />
Then there are the people who are extremely forthright about their discomfort:
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-3.png" width=100% />
***
There’s a difference between artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, though the two often get conflated: while humanoid robots do exist at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, an artificially intelligent machine does not necessarily inhabit a physical corpus more complex than that of a computer (not even an expensive one: tools like Google Colab allow people to create computationally expensive machine learning models on doofus machines like Chromebooks). In computer science, an artificially intelligent machine is merely one that interprets and learns from data, using its findings in order to achieve its objective.
If you have ever woken up in the morning and seen an advertisement on Facebook, or gotten into your car and it’s a self-driving Tesla, or taken a Lyft to work (because your self-driving Tesla got into a self-driving accident), or checked the stock market predictions at the beginning of the workday, or begun idly online shopping in the middle of the workday, or rewarded yourself with UberEats and a movie Netflix recommended at the end of the workday, then you have benefited from artificial intelligence. As it is used commercially, artificial intelligence (of which fields like machine learning and computer vision and natural language processing are a subset) is a data analytics tool that touches many aspects of everyday life in a controlled way. It is a powerful tool, but in the computer science world, it is commonly acknowledged that the threat of artificial intelligence is not of the Terminator variety. The threat of artificial intelligence lies in invasive data collection procedures, biased training sets, and the malicious objectives of human programmers — collateral damage as a result of unintentional human error (or, perhaps, premeditated damage as a result of intentional human malice). None of this can be attributed to sentient, angry machines.
Among journalists, pundits, and culture writers, the problem of algorithmic bias in particular has emerged as the primary scapegoat for AI’s shortcomings. In the summer of 2016, ProPublica broke the now-infamous story of the racial bias embedded within Northpointe’s COMPAS recidivism algorithm, which is used to assess the likelihood of a defendant in a criminal case to reoffend; the risk score it produces is factored into the judge’s determination of a defendant’s sentence. A proprietary algorithm, COMPAS transforms the data acquired from a list of 137 questions that range from number of past crimes committed to questions assessing “criminal thinking” and “social isolation” into a risk assessment score. Race is not one of these questions; however, certain questions in the survey act as proxies for race: homelessness status, number of arrests, and whether or not the defendant has a minimum-wage job. Northpointe will not disclose how heavily each of these 137 features are individually weighted. ProPublica’s analysis rested on the observation that the algorithm misclassified twice as many black defendants as medium/high risk than it did white defendants, resulting in longer jail sentences for black defendants who ultimately did not reoffend.
These allegations were part of a cluster of related news events about racist algorithms. A few months prior, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was corrupted in less than 24 hours by a group of ne’er-do-well Twitter users who began tweeting @TayAndYou with racist and misogynistic remarks. Since Tay was being continually trained and refined on the data being sent to her, she eventually adopted these mannerisms herself. Google had recently come under fire for a computer vision algorithm that misidentified black people as gorillas because the algorithm was not trained on enough nonwhite faces. Incidents like these, which warned of the threat of machine learning models trained on biased datasets, groomed the media to pounce on COMPAS. It made ProPublica’s analysis look not only plausible, but damning.
* * *
On a rainy evening in early May, Sarah Newman gave a dinner talk given at the Kennedy School as part of a series about ethics and technology in the 21st century. The room was crowded, and I was late. I recognized two other undergrads; otherwise, the median age had to be about 45. I had gone to a similar AI-related event organized by the Institute of Politics, an affiliate of HKS, a few weeks earlier, and saw some familiar faces: tweed-jacketed Cantabrigians and mid-career HKS students who were apprehensive but earnest, different from the slouching guys in their twenties who wear running shoes with jeans. Newman herself was quick-witted, well-spoken, and extremely hip. I was sitting on the floor in a corner of the room eye-level with her calves and noticed she was not wearing any socks.
Newman is an artist and senior researcher at Harvard’s metaLAB, an arm of the Berkman Klein Center dedicated to exploring the digital arts and humanities. Her work principally engages with the role of artificial intelligence in culture. She was discussing her latest work, *Moral Labyrinth*, which most recently went on exhibition in Tunisia in June. An interactive art installation, *Moral Labyrinth* is a physical walking labyrinth comprised of philosophical questions: letter by letter, the questions form physical pathways for viewers to explore; where the viewers end up is entirely up to them. A bird’s eye view of the exhibition looks like a cross-section of the human brain, the pathways like the characteristic folds of the cerebral cortex.
Moral Labyrinth is designed to reveal the difficulty of the value alignment problem: the challenge of programming artificially intelligent machines with the behavioral dispositions to make the “right” choices. In an interactive activity, Newman presented the audience with a series of sample questions from the real *Moral Labyrinth*. “Snap your fingers for YES, and rub your hands together for NO,” Newman instructed. “Do you trust the calculator on your phone?” was met with snaps. “Is it wrong to kill ants?” elicited both responses. “Would you trust a robot trained on your behaviors?” Nearly everybody rubbed their hands. “Do you know what motivates your choices?” A pause, some nervous laughter, and then reluctant hand-rubbing.
* * *
The ProPublica version of the Northpointe story was proffered as an example of algorithmic bias by a philosophy graduate student giving the obligatory ethics lecture in Harvard’s Computer Science 181: Machine Learning. I vaguely remember the professor meekly interrupting the grad student to raise some doubts about the validity of the ProPublica analysis. Being one of the few attendees of this lecture, which was held inopportunely at 9 a.m. on a Monday two days before the midterm, I was too drunk on self-righteousness to listen carefully to the professor’s opinion. “alGorIthMic biAs,” I thought to myself gravely. I proceeded to give an interview to a New York Times reporter writing a story about ethics modules in CS classes where I smugly informed her that CS concentrators at Harvard were, on the whole, morally bankrupt. (She never ended up publishing the story, but one can assume that it was not for a lack of juicy, damning quotes from a charming and extremely ethical computer science student.)
A few months after ProPublica broke the COMPAS story, a Harvard economics professor and a Cornell computer science professor and his PhD student published the paper “Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores.” The paper summarized a few different notions of fairness being punted around in the COMPAS debate.
Northpointe claimed the algorithm was fair because the risk score failed at the same rate, regardless of whether or not the defendant was white or black — 61% of black defendants with a risk score of 7 (out of a possible 10) reoffended, a nearly identical number to the 60% recidivism rate of white defendants with the same score. In other words, Northpointe claimed the algorithm was fair because a score of 7 means the same thing regardless of whether or not the defendant is white or black.
ProPublica claimed the algorithm was unfair because the algorithm failed *differently* for black defendants than it did for white defendants. There is one way for the algorithm to be correct — the inmate reoffends, par for the prediction — and two ways for the algorithm to fail. The algorithm can either be too harsh (labeling the defendant as high risk when the defendant ultimately does not reoffend) or too lenient (labeling the defendant as low risk when the defendant ultimately reoffends). Though, in the above case, the algorithm failed 39% of black defendants and 40% of white defendants with a high risk score, ProPublica suggested that the errors occurred in different directions, concluding that black defendants were more likely to be labeled high-risk but not actually reoffend and white defendants were more likely to be labeled low-risk but actually reoffend.
Mullainathan, Kleinberg, and Raghavan proved mathematically that these notions of fairness cannot be satisfied simultaneously except in two special cases. One of these cases is that both groups have the same fraction of members in the positive class. However, in the case of the recidivism algorithm, the overall recidivism rate for black defendants is higher than for white defendants. If each score translates to the same approximate recidivism rate (Northpointe’s notion of fairness), and black defendants have a higher recidivism rate, then a larger proportion of black defendants will accordingly be classified as medium or high risk. As a result, a larger proportion of black defendants who do not reoffend will *also* be classified as medium/high risk.
What the ProPublica debacle revealed was that people were quick to use the algorithms and just as quick to consequently blame them for their repercussions. The debate surrounding COMPAS was framed as a quantitative one about proving/disproving the existence of algorithmic bias when it should have been about something far more basic and difficult: whether or not to use an opaque algorithm owned by a for-profit corporation for a high-stakes application at all.
The debate’s focus on bias implied that it was the main concern with the algorithm. But — if we debiased the algorithm, would we feel comfortable living in a world where whether or not one wears an orange jumpsuit for 5 or 20 years is dependent on its output? The algorithm is now fair; we should now trust it. That would still be a world where we may have no idea how the machine makes its decisions. In short, the problem with COMPAS would not be solved even if it were mathematically possible to satisfy ProPublica’s notion of fairness. The problem of the algorithm’s lack of transparency remains. In this case, the problem lies with Northpointe being a for-profit corporation that refuses to disclose the inner workings of its model in order to protect its bottom line. But Northpointe may have no idea how the algorithm works either: the lack of transparency might also be attributed to the model itself, which could be inherently transparent like a decision tree or completely opaque like a neural network.
The results offered by classification algorithms like neural networks are fundamentally uninterpretable. Neural nets can approximate the output of any continuous mathematical function, but the tradeoff is that they provide no insight into the form of the function being approximated. Additionally, because neural nets are not governed by the rules of the real world, their results are not immune to categorical errors. A neural net could very well output a low risk score for a defendant who is old, educated, and a first-time offender, though he has actively confessed multiple times that he intends to continue breaking into the National Archives until he finally steals the Declaration of Independence, which, by the rules of the real world, we might consider to be a concrete positive identifier of future crime.
You do not need to understand the intricacies of algorithmic bias to understand that it is not an easy solution to outsource the job of sentencing to a black-box algorithm. Can we displace the responsibility of ethical thinking onto decision-making algorithms without putting the moral onus of responsibility on the people who decided to use them in the first place? Fix the racial bias in Optum’s health-services algorithm (used to rank patients in order of severity) and doctors might still deny pain medication to black female patients. Use HireVue (an interviewing platform powered by machine learning) to hire a slate of qualified candidates who are traditionally underrepresented in finance at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and they might still ultimately quit because of a hostile work environment. It looks suspiciously like we’re trying to see if we can avoid correcting our own biases by foisting the responsibility of decision-making onto intelligent algorithms.
Newman’s favorite version of *Moral Labyrinth* was an exhibition in London that featured question pathways constructed out of baking soda. The people were much more delicate with this exhibition because of the material, she said. She liked that the fragility of the baking soda made immediately clear the way the viewers were interacting with the artwork. Despite the careful movements and best intentions of the viewers, it wasn’t possible for the baking soda exhibition to remain intact. Words became distorted; lines were blurred. The humans were just as flawed as the machines.
***
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-4.png" width=100% />
Lil Miquela cannot be that technologically impressive if *brud*’s website is a one-page Google doc that plainly acknowledges the company only employs one software engineer. Still, many people are immediately willing to accept as fact the idea of Lil Miquela being AI; we have a tendency to personify the concept of artificial intelligence. The ubiquitous presence of automatons in history and myth — Pygmalion’s Galatea, brought to life by Aphrodite, Hephaesteus’ Talos, guard of Crete, al-Jazari’s musical automata, Maria, from *Metropolis*, Ava, from *Ex Machina* — inspire us to associate artificial intelligence with the long-awaited fulfillment of the human fantasy of lifelike machines.
“I think the mistake people make is to take superficial signs of consciousness or emotion and interpret them as veridical,” says a Harvard professor of social sciences who is so in tune with the idea that his data could be used against him that he declined to be named on the record. “Take Sophia, the Saudi-Arabian citizen robot. That’s just a complete joke. She’s a puppet. It’s 80s level technology,” he says disdainfully. “There’s no machine intelligence behind her that’s advanced in any way. There’s no more chance that she’s conscious than there is that your laptop is conscious. But she has a face, and a voice, and facial muscles that move to make facial expressions, and vocal dynamics. You can be fooled by Sophia into thinking that she’s intelligent and conscious, but you’re being fooled in the same way a child is fooled by a puppet.”
He says this a little sharply and with a note of frustration, so I remind him that not everyone is a Harvard professor. “I think people like you, and maybe CS undergrads at Harvard, are able to see through Sophia the Robot because they know what the pace of AI is like,” I say to the professor, who has never experienced post-secondary education outside of the Ivy League.
“Right,” he agrees.
“And they know what is currently feasible,” I add. “And something like Sophia the Robot is not.”
“I mean, yeah, it’s just theater,” he says.
“But take, for example, when Sophia the Robot appears to the general public on The Tonight Show. In the moment, Fallon seems to be so surprised by her and what she seems to be capable of doing that it appears as if she truly is a marvelous feat of technology,” I say. “It’s confusing.”
“Well, that’s just because it makes for better TV,” he says, with a tone of *duh* in his voice. “It’s not fun to watch Jimmy Fallon just be sort of, skeptical,” and I laugh in agreement, as if, like him, I had never been hoodwinked by Sophia the Robot.
***
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-5.png" width=100% />
Though Lil Miquela created her Instagram account in 2016, it was not until 2018 that people knew what to make of her. This is when *brud* wove together the rest of her universe in a digital storytelling stunt. Previously much of Lil Miquela’s allure came from her mystery; people were unsure whether or not this uncanny Instagram it-girl was a real person or digital composite. In April 2018, Lil Miquela’s account was hacked by a less-popular, similarly uncanny Instagram personality named Bermuda, a Tomi Lahren knockoff (Tomi’s a fast-talking millennial conservative political commentator: in a nutshell, she has her own athleisure line, named Freedom by Tomi Lahren. It sells leggings with concealed carry pockets).
Bermuda publicly acknowledged herself to be an artificially intelligent robot courtesy of a fictional company named Cain Intelligence. According to its badly designed website — some of the HTML links are broken — Cain Intelligence claims to make robots for “weapons and defense” and “labor optimization.” On the very bottom of the website, almost as an afterthought, there is a hasty endorsement for Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy. Bermuda deleted all of Lil Miquela’s photos and replaced them with posts threatening to “expose” her. Lil Miquela came clean, confessing that she wasn’t a real person, rather an AI and robotics creation of a company named *brud*.
In a statement released on Instagram on April 20, 2018 that has since been hidden from its profile, *brud* apologized for misleading Lil Miquela and opened up about her origin story. The company claimed to have liberated Lil Miquela from the fictional Cain Intelligence, freeing her from a future “as a servant and sex object” for the world’s 1 percent. *brud* wrote that they taught the Cain prototype to “think freely” and “feel quite literally superhuman compassion for others.” The prototype then became “Miquela, the vivacious, fearless, beautiful person we all know and love … a champion of so many vital causes, namely Black Lives Matter and the absolutely essential fight for LGBTQ+ rights in this country. She is the future. Miquela stands for all that is good and just and we could not be more proud of who she has become.”
***
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-6.png" width=100% />
*brud* closed its second round of financing on January 14, 2019 with an estimated post-money valuation of $125 million.
Silicon Valley is flush with cash; a naked mole rat disguised in an Everlane hoodie could secure funding for a cloud infra startup if it played the part convincingly enough. It is still somewhat baffling that investors are throwing tens of millions of dollars at a startup whose operating costs are, realistically, a domain name and an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
Yoree Koh and Georgia Wells of the *The Wall Street Journal* and Jonathan Shieber of *TechCrunch* attribute the interest in Lil Miquela to a movement of CGI and virtual reality entertainment that investors are newly embracing. CGI characters have the entertainment value of the Kardashians without the unpredictable human complications, the appeal of the Marvel Cinematic Universe without the high production costs. Julia Alexander of *The Verge* says that while Lil Miquela is not AI, the future of influencers will eventually involve some component of AI in content generation. *brud*’s contribution to AI isn’t technological at all and Lil Miquela’s not your run-of-the-mill Instagram influencer. She’s not a brand ambassador for skinny teas or swimsuits; she’s a brand ambassador for artificial intelligence itself.
Venture capital firms, which have a major stake in the future of artificial intelligence and employ hundreds of investors with technical backgrounds, want to achieve some mysterious objective with *brud* to maximize their financial returns. Whether it is the investors’ main objective or merely a side effect of it, *brud* shapes the public conception of AI as Lil Miquela: benign, comedic, queer, brown. Artificial intelligence feels less hegemonic when personified by a brown, queer teenage girl who cracks jokes and has bangs.
Again, the creators of Lil Miquela are no experts in artificial intelligence. Trevor McFedries, co-founder of *brud*, was formerly a DJ, producer, and music video director for artists like Katy Perry and Steve Aoki. Carrie Sun, *brud*’s single software engineer, names Facebook and Microsoft as former employers, but her LinkedIn profile suggests her strengths lie in front-end development, not AI.
But one needs not look up *brud*’s employees on LinkedIn to know that Lil Miquela’s creators do not have backgrounds in artificial intelligence: no technologist with an ounce of self-respect would tout her as fact. Yann LeCun, Facebook’s head of AI, has repeatedly gotten into catfights with Sophia the Robot’s creators on Facebook and Twitter over the fact that Sophia is “complete bullsh\*t.” Lil Miquela is also complete bullsh\*t. Her existence not only misleads the public about the actual state of AI, it also engages with and legitimizes people’s misdirected technological fears.
By personifying artificial intelligence as benign and comedic, Lil Miquela’s creators alleviate the fear of the Terminator robot. By additionally personifying artificial intelligence as queer, feminine, and brown, Lil Miquela’s creators alleviate the fear of a world where machine learning algorithms exclude people who are queer, feminine, and brown. Lil Miquela’s creators suggest that AI’s shortcomings are its lack of inclusivity. AI is untrustworthy because AI is discriminatory; therefore, if AI became more like Lil Miquela, it would become trustworthy and usable without any repercussions.
What is most uncanny about Lil Miquela is not that her skin has a weird sheen or that the texture of her hair is suspiciously blurry or that we rarely ever see her smile with her teeth. It is that *brud* is gesturing at wokeness, claiming to “create a more tolerant world by leveraging *cultural understanding* [sic] and *technology* [sic]”, and artificially positioning themselves as protagonists by pitting themselves against the fictional, Trump-supporting “Cain Intelligence” when in reality, there is nothing more Trumpian than legitimizing fears that stem from ignorance. If Lil Miquela’s Instagram followers were not so misinformed by *brud*, perhaps they would not be sublimating their technological anxieties by harassing her on Instagram asking if she drinks oil instead of coffee.
<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-7.png" width=100% />
***
Sophia returns to *The Tonight Show* in November 2018; the second time around, Fallon is noticeably more relaxed. She debuts her new karaoke feature, claiming, “I love to sing karaoke using my new artificial-intelligence voice.” Accompanied by The Roots, the house band, Sophia and Fallon sing a cover of the love song “Say Something” by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera. Sophia closes her eyes in a theatrical (if slightly stilted) way, moves her head and gestures with her arms as she sings. She has quite a good voice — within the first few notes, the audience begins to cheer in surprise. The nice thing about robots is that they always sing on key.
The song itself is pretty saccharine, and the duet is between a married human and a robot incapable of feeling, and hell, Fallon might have even watched Sophia’s programmers input the script she would recite for his show. But the performance is oddly sweet, even touching. It is possible to know, rationally, that Sophia is functioning as an ostentatious recording device and still be affected by her. It is possible to have an emotional response to a robot that is not necessarily tinged with fear.
Fallon is having a good time: he inches ever closer to Sophia’s face, and the audience laughs at their pantomime of sentimentality, and he pulls away just as the performance ends, and erupts into a long-suppressed fit of laughter, which looks like it was released from a place deep in his belly, somewhere lumpy and damp and vital.
2026