The personless apology
When it screws up, ChatGPT apologizes to me. It has the desired effect: I am defanged in the moment, willing to move on and trust again. But what is artificial remorse doing to the idea of the apology?
Four tones.
May I have your attention please…the 1155 service to Edinburgh has been delayed by approximately sixteen minutes. I am very sorry for this delay.
It was October 2004. I was seated in the cavernous echo of Birmingham New Street Station, waiting for a train to the north of England. I looked up, then around at my fellow travelers, unanimous in their bored disinterest at the announcement. I am very sorry for this delay, he had said. I was struck by the pronoun—not “Virgin Trains apologizes for the delay,” not even “we are sorry,” but I—“I am very sorry.”
It was quite moving, to my ears anyway, this simple claim of responsibility for something that can’t remotely have been his fault. This guy, this Birmingham Everyman, simply wished like hell that we hadn’t been inconvenienced.
Four tones.
May I have your attention please…the 1137 Central service to London Marylebone has been delayed by approximately one hour and seventeen minutes. I am extremely sorry for this severe delay.
Oh, you poor, gentle man! I pictured him sweaty and pale in a joyless cubicle of pale-green cinderblock, moist-eyed before microphone and screen, bright red Virgin Trains necktie cinched tight to the precise company specs, blaming himself for what could not truly be helped. I wanted to find his little room and shout reassurances under the unlabeled door that he wasn't at fault, that he couldn’t have been. These things happen, there’s nothing to be done, we soldier on together.
My empathetic reverie was interrupted by yet another announcement of delay—and it was in this one that I noticed the slightest…catch…between certain words. Not the catch of emotion in the throat, but the tiny gap that separates key words from surrounding clauses in—a voice synthesis program. It was a really good one, but a definite synth nonetheless.
You knew right away, didn’t you. But you’re living in the future. This was 2004, when such a thing was not yet common.
At first I was amused by my mistake. Then it hit me: Instead of being a beacon of personal responsibility, the pronoun “I”, in the absence of a speaker, now had no meaning whatsoever.
No. It's worse than that. The “I” now represented a deflection of responsibility away from the actual people of the train company (who may very well have been responsible)—away, in fact, from all humankind. No need for anyone to take responsibility; the machine’s already accepted blame! It was cynically brilliant. They’d created an entity to announce the bad news, fall on its own sword, then return to work.
Four tones.
Ladies and gentlemen…I don’t know how to say this, but…Oh, best out with it and done, my mother always said. There’s been a delay on the 1223 to Leeds, quite a sizeable one from the look of it. I can’t even give a proper estimate of how long you’ll be inconvenienced, which pains me still further. Please do forgive my stupidity. And I beg you not to blame the good and noble people of Virgin Trains, whose trim, side-zippered boots I am unfit to lick. I’ll tender my resignation in the morning, that their fine accomplishments be sullied no further by my feckless incompetence.
Twenty years later, the personless apology is now an everyday event. ChatGPT apologizes to me whenever it fails to add three numbers correctly, or when I point out that the list of living economists I requested includes two who've been dead since the Johnson administration. I’m sorry for the confusion, My apologies for the inconvenience, and I regret the error in my response must be among the most common phrases here in the infancy of public-facing AI. It has the desired effect: I am defanged in the moment, more willing to move on, to forgive and to trust again.
Exactly what the Birmingham announcement was intended to do to and for irritated passengers.
The personless apology is likely to be a fixture of our world well into the future, and I wonder about the long-term effects of constant meaningless apologies. Will my daily saturation in artificial remorse make me more willing to apologize to other humans for my own fecklessness, or will the constant exposure to meaningless apologies blunt the effectiveness of apology itself?
Or will we keep asking these meaningless questions until we end up receiving a personless apology outside the pod bay doors?
