Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

#6/12 The Momma Dom Inquiry: Curiosities of the Modern Mind

The Machine Is Already in the Room

AI is not coming someday. It is already in the classroom, the checkout cart, the job portal, the loan office, and the evidence people used to trust.

By The Momma Dom by Katie M. Webb

💜MOMMA’S MENU SYSTEM FOR EASIER NAVIGATION💜

Free Read. Enjoy!

💭 AI transparency ~ I used AI for the imagining of my images and to look up a few key facts on my topic for this article. I use AI responsibly. I am stating it was at play.

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

The Machine Is Already in the Room, As Stated Above

The future did not arrive as promised by science fiction books, tv shows, and movies. There were no chrome boots that blasted flames as one stepped down, not a glowing eyeball that keeps everyone in check for some futuristic government, that requires aliens to walk with fog machines, and neon green light floating somewhere behind them just to prove a point.

It did not announce itself by knocking. Knock, Knock It wasn’t introduced by dramatic actors with good hair and rich soulful voices on the 6 o’clock newses commercials selling pharmaceuticals with names like Moseaalt. It slid in somewhere from left field.

It arrived as a checkbox on some homework helper used by some kid who didn’t care if the computer knew if he wasn’t a robot or not. It announced itself in the price that changes in your digital cart, look quickly or you might miss the savings turned upcharge.

A job searching site that AI sorts you and labels you before the potential employer sees your CV or resume and long before they see your name. A decision on a loan that a human can’t explain without a long report from the AI detailing their logical choice.

You might feel it embbed into your own life with how a chatbot or AI you use sounds too much like an empathetic friend but a bit flatter. A government form that flagged somebody as a risk without anything crossing a human’s hands.

Consider the camera in your house that can alert your security system the height of the person in the livingroom doesn’t match anyone in the family’s.

The modern trend is to find AI in the video of that chocolate factory that really has a chocolate waterfall. While it may or may not be real we keep saying AI is coming…..

Sproutlings AI, well, it already has taken a digital chair at the table. Not at the back of the room either by the stale cookies and coins that say what meeting it is for them. It hasn’t shown up by the coat rack with the wobbly leg and near the stain that may or may not be coffee.

No, AI is sitting right up front, wearing a little badge saying, “Non-human not NPC”, holding a digital clipboard, and asking humans to please wait while the codex of system reviews their information against the whole of the internet, to let it know that the system is smarter than you.

Remember the AI machine just sorted you for reading The Momma Dom. See that is the problem, not that the machine exists or is powerful enough to categorize you as a cat lover because, every other incognito websites you hit has the word Pussy in it, it’s in the way we keep stepping aside easily.

The problem is that humans keep giving the machine access to areas where decisions are made. Of course, humans that give up that control start acting upset and bewildered when AI machines start making choices that the humans gave it the parameters to decide on.

Then when it goes wrong?

Well the person, the company, the office worker on the late night shift in the green and red shirt with the ketchup stain blended in, shrugs with nary a look. Looking past what is playing out but rarely getting involved is the new black. I will say it twice. “Looking past what is playing out but rarely getting involved is the new black.”

The most dangerous sentence in modern life and not because it sounds dramatic but because it sounds completely normal and fashionable. The new black? “I use AI, Chat Gpt is amazing, Claude, well forget-about-it…”

Mommaism: AI is not the villain. Unaccountable decision-making is.

First, It Learned to Sound Like Help

AI did not win people over by sounding like a futuristic electronical monster of power and control. That would have been too easy.

In fact, had it arrived screaming that it had come for the space that was occupied by the résumé, the grocery bill, the child’s homework, the loneliness of the nighttime, the porch camera, and the personal data it can gather on us, we might have had a fighting chance.

We would have at least put down the sandwich and looked sideways saying, “WTF” in a much more dignified way. Instead, it arrived as help what a terrible offer of saved time readers. I mean it might have helped write a legible email and cleaned up the paragraphs of the text.

When humans asked it made the lists. If a big word needed a definition, there it was a direct answer with a fake built in tone. If you hinted at the goal of obtaining ten headlines with odd options for knowledge, when your brain was full of dryer lint and unpaid parking tickets, you were given it.

It turned confusion into insight one could understand and we liked it. Of course we like it, why wouldn’t we. It was as convenient as sliced bread and individual wrapped slices of cheese, or those tea bags with the little strings on it and the paper tags for steeping and dunking.

People are overworked. They have to manage life through twelve different apps, nine different passwords, six verification codes that expire after four seconds, and one customer-service-bot named something cheerful like Lyle the easier AI with a Smile while your boyfriend ran off with a waitress.

Let me tell you that Lyle never helps. He says he understands your frustration and offers the same three choices in a loop until you begin to understand why people preferred walking into a building and making eye contact with the now ex-boyfriend in the first place. Still it took effort.

So when AI actually helped, people opened the door quickly and said, “Come on in. We have snacks and specialty made drinks in your honor.” Before you start pointing out how foolish this sounds take into account that when things become trusted and everyday, the everyday things of it become invincible, and power often hides within that invincible.

Momma asked herself why would anyone give into the AI Machine? Well that is the crux of it, that is also the human part in this isn’t it Sproutlings?

This is the part where the real turn in this AI series is bending to the nature of what it is. Now we are on a harder question. What happens when the Machine stops sitting beside us and starts sitting between us and the doors?

That is the doors to:

• School
• Work
• Credit
• Privacy
• Being believed
• Being worthy of an algorythm

That is where this gets less technology cute but still facinating, useful and at times I must admit quite brilliant. Remember that it is a tool. It is one thing I don’t forget, a gatekeeper is another.

Mommaism: The problem is not the tool. The problem is when no human remains responsible for what the tool does.

The Classroom Became a Calculator for the Whole Brain

Every generation gets its panic on what will disappear with evolution. The pencil with it’s little pink eraser will ruin memory by writing something down. Spellcheck showed up on the scene and everyone just knew that it would ruin spellllling. I mean spelling.

The view continues into search engines ruining research done in a library and with the dewey decimal system versus Google, Edge, ChatGPT, or Yahoo! Phones will ruin attention and focus while social media will ruin a person’s self-view and place in reality, instead of that a person’s status is in that moment in time and not when you see it on the web.

Now, AI has walked into the classroom carrying a denim bookbag transporting the image of a famous tv show where the character fell down and didn’t realize they had fallen into the coded matrix of the digital twilight zone. AI has a forged hall pass, and the confidence of a substitute teacher who has not yet met eighth period.

Everybody wants to talk about the cheating with AI use. Fine yes, cheating matters but cheating is not the whole story. The bigger question is not whether a student can make AI write the essay, which we all know is a yes. The bigger question is what happens when the struggle disappears because learning is not just the answer to the problem.

Write the essay is a simple request. It should be that learning is the wrestling, it is the confusion in the bad first draft. There is wisdom in the sentence that collapses like a lawn chair at a 4th of July party. It is in the math problems that mock you until the pattern finally clicks. Worked out with that pencil and the pink eraser.

Learning is in the way you do not understand that book by that famous author. That is until the teacher says one thing and suddenly the lights come on. Sometimes the learning is in the embarrassment of being wrong and the dignity of trying again. That is all where the mind grows its calluses to continue.

Now let Momma bake your noodle, AI can interrupt that all. It’s not a cool party trick and it’s not because AI is evil. It’s because AI is smooth and cool like a jazzy singer in a smokey room from the 1950s got it all under control with the crowd. Maybe AI is every tool but cool for the mocked up 50s view, if you know what I mean.

The AI Machine can give a student the answer to any problem before the student has built the mental muscle to deserve it. That sounds harsh, but let’s be honest, nobody gets strong by watching a treadmill run without getting on one and being thrown off.

Now if a mentor or a teacher helps a student use AI to ask better questions or compare ideas? That can be doing work that will help them to learn. That can be powerful. When a child can learn to challenge an argument, better explain a concept or find the words to form an argument? That is where the education system is going.

AI as a form of teachers assistant.

That can be access and support like a digital tutor in the pocket for the kid whose parents cannot afford one, what does it cost but internet access and a way to get at it. That can be the first time a student who felt stupid realizes they were not stupid, they just needed it explained differently.

Good, use the tool but if the machine does the thinking, the student only inherits the answer. The paper still can not be AI and it still can not be stolen but AI can be the library research tool that access more quickly. Now the mind that knows how to reach it and there is a difference. A distinctive big one.

The old classroom problems of the noggin was whether students were paying attention or drifting. Perhaps little Jimmy was sitting and listening to teacher in her clunky black shoes and that one nylon that was sagging. Perhaps that sagging nylon made him thing of the rope he needed to climb next period in gym. Maybe her voice was so perfect in cadence he started to fall asleep.

The new classroom problem is whether anyone can tell where the student ends and the AI Machine begins. See the concept of teachers just grading essays is not accurate anymore. They are suddenly like judges on some out there cooking show where the presentation, taste, creativity of the recipe are all given a number after a harsh critique, or over the top mouth watering gurgle of joy.

The teachers of today are forced to scrutinize trust, process and whether the assignment is still measuring what it was built to measure. That Sproutlings is not a small adjustment in the old time, this is legible, sounds good, one too many run on sentences, B+. The whole system is being asked to look at it’s entire foundation as it shakes. Like when new math hit the scene.

The students have the advantage in some regards as the teachers are still on dial up modems understandings and the children are being trained on the equivalent of a program(s) with AI personality and intelligence that can be tweaked to their language and thinking processes. This is amazing as it will unlock their learning frequencies that perhaps no teacher has the awareness and data gathering to.

Understand that this will not maybe unlock, it will unlock the keys of learning at their level and without the human to human scars of anxiety and stress developing. It will adjust to remove that feature in the human brains programming.

So no, the question is not whether AI should be allowed in school. That is rather too small of thinking. The question is this Momma’s mind, what kind of thinking do we still want children to practice without a machine holding the chalk and writing on the chalkboard?

That is the question worth keeping close as we move on to the new digital in control age..

Mommaism: If the machine does the struggle of the work, the student may get the answer to the problem without building the mind that knows how to navigate thoughts to reach it. The answer that is.

The Price Tag Started Watching You Back

A price tag used to just hide under the armpit of that great dress. It built up anticipation at what the cost was and if you could afford it. You blinked and looked and there it was sitting quiet and honest. When it showed its face you knew what you had to pay. Milk, shoes, dogfood, that little frog planter in the strange color that you were going to use for a great popcorn bucket hack, this much per the tag.

We understood early bird sales at the grocery store on meat day. We got that we needed to clip the coupons to use the coupons. We all got the concept of 24% off clearance racks, holiday black friday pricing, and the dark arts of airline tickets, where a seat can cost one thing at breakfast and something offensive by lunch. Plus additional baggage handling charges and fees if traveling with an orange orangatang furry.

Notice my readers that AI adds a new possibility to this struggle. Of course it does right? The price may not just reflect the product we are discussing. It may reflect what a company thinks it knows about you. I will let that settle in but Momma would also like to remind you that in most cases where you live, what kind of device you use, and how often you buy it, is right there for the taking. You usually agree in the TOS that you say ok and give electronic privileges to you for them. Now run that and be monitored by that companies particular AI. Likely named SalEupchuck.

SalEupchuck knows if you seem loyal or desparate. It will relish the idea that you left the cart and came back. It will clue into the fact that you compared prices and that you always pay full price on Tuesdays because you are busier than usual. Your AI order calendar told the Machine the kind of person that it thinks you are and will deal with the cart later and then later shows up with pop up offer for an ordering Club you could join.

This is where that pricing I spoke of gets personal and nonpersonal like a handwritten thank you note from a ink signing printer run by an AI sending it. Personal like a ninja furry bear in your trash who knows your grocery schedule and how often you go through honey.

AI is not only deciding what you see on your midnight window shopping trips. It may decide what you pay and in AI fashion it doesn’t share the old fairness instincts and Momma starts twitching and heating up. Let me explain, if I buy the same thing at the same time from the same company, but the Machine thinks I will pay more because of my zip code, my device, my loyalty, or my panic level, then the price tag has stopped being a price tag and it has become an interrogation of willingness to pay more and how much you are willing to pay.

What can we get out of this lesson? Consumers deserve to know whether the price in front of them is the price of the thing, or the price of being them. That sentence should make your eyebrows move up into a hard WTF arch. Imagine that. The price you pay is the price of being you. The reality that your checkout cart is actually looking back and reminding you that you bought eggs on a Tuesday 3 years ago. You should get eggs again.

The coupon that knows you are tired but the grocery app knows you always buy the same dog food and will pay three dollars more because Mr. Fidgit E. is not switching brands just because capitalism had a mood swing. That is not convenience folks, that is leverage.

Leverage needs light on the whole AI scheme.

Mommaism: The old price tag told you what something cost. The new one may be asking what it can get away with while you are too distracted to care.

Hiring Became a Filter Before It Became a Conversation

The modern job hunt already feels like yelling your résumé into a canyon of nothingness. You upload the résumé. Then the site you use asks you to retype the résumé. Then if you are lucky and in need of pointless wasted time, it asks for the work history already on the résumé.

The interrogation continues when it wants your references, your availability to work, your willingness to relocate to the west side of town, your legal status and if ICE will be beating down their doors, your skill level to navigate the websites wishes, your salary range after the skills you learned to try and find a job, your preferred work environment inside or outside on a sunny day, and whether you are comfortable in a fast-paced setting where you might be talked down to or molested.

Which, translated, means can you be interrupted every four minutes by someone who says Friday potluck lunch, without biting them and declaring that they are going to taste great as a dip on Friday? Just kidding I recently watched Silence of The Lambs. Cannibalism leaves a bad taste just say no.

Coming back to AI and job searching, something scans you. Maybe it ranks you after it sorts you as possibly having odd food choices. Maybe it rejects you before a human ever sees your name or explains that the whole floor shares the cafeteria kitchen. Be considerate of space and do not take anyone else’s food.

AI in hiring is sold as efficiency and let’s not pretend hiring was a golden meadow before the machines showed up as humans' are biased too. Humans hire people who remind them of themselves. Humans confuse confidence with competence and mistake a limp handshake for characters that they would reject for reasons they would never say out loud.

So yes, the fantasy is tempting to let the machine look for only these qualifications or not that prejudice. Put that on a mug and sell them as the bold grand way. Then ask the next question for awareness. Who trained the Machine? A machine trained on our human history can learn human prejudice with excellent grammar and perfect layout and spelling.

If a company’s past hiring history favored certain graduate schools, career paths, hobbies, uninterrupted work histories, or polished little community ladders, the AI jury may learn that those patterns mean good candidates. Those with areas of given gaps in time will disappear, the caregiver, disabled applicant, older worker, or the cancer survivor.

Note readers that the person who had to take the long road disappears or who learned everything the hard way disappears. Everyone gets to say the system ranked the applicants but no, that is not enough. A résumé gap may look empty and cast aside to a machine. To a human, it may contain a whole battlefield unseen. A caregiving year for one, a cancer year for another, a grief year for the father who lost his child to the battle.

A year perhaps when someone held a family together with duct tape, freezer meals, insurance calls, and a level of executive function that would make a project manager weep into their ergonomic keyboard but the AI may not know that. The model may not value that while the filter will not care. That is how a person with depth gets treated like a formatting problem that will be cast out as an anomaly to be dumped every week by the AI trash dump.

AI does not have to hate you to harm you. It doesn’t hate you. Keep that in mind. It only has to misunderstand what makes you valuable. That is why disclosure matters with accountability. That is why this section exists in this article, so what the system says cannot be the end of the conversation.

Think about it. If a machine helps decide who gets seen, someone must be able to explain how it got to that vision.

Mommaism: A résumé gap may look empty to a machine. To a human, it may contain more than a heartless cold machine will see, without emotions and only parameters can put into a bigger picture.

The Loan Office Learned to Say No in Math

Money has always had a language problem with reality. The people who need the clearest answers about borrowing usually get the foggiest answers when denied or unqualified. Like an employment gap, a loan decision is not just an non-explanation. It is usually tied to a household, transportation, a move across country that has been coming on, or a business idea just waiting to be pursued.

A way to replace the furnace before winter turns your living room into a meat locker with throw pillows could be tied to a loan that is badly needed.

Lending has always used models with deep lines and lots of underwriting. Credit has always involved scoring that hit several credit deciding places. You got a number and that is your smile or your frown going in. AI did not invent current harsh math but it can make the math faster to add up, wider to reach, deeper to wade through, and harder to understand.

That is where the trouble starts because it is just a yes or no but when a person is denied they need and want to know why specifically, not vaguely. Credit factors, risk profiles, underwriting models decided by parameters someone in the 2nd cubicle of the corporate offices slid into place with their slide controls in blue. These are not answers just fluff.

People cannot fix what they cannot see and if they are unaware of an AI flag, you cannot repair a credit issue if no one tells you what it is. You cannot challenge an error if the error is buried under check boxes. You cannot appeal a decision if the decision is sealed inside a black box with a polite font that numbers are not automatically fair game for this loan.

That is one of the lies people love because it sounds like it should not be. Numbers can inherit history, bias, and every old locked door while pretending all of that is a new lock in new technologies 7 day old pair of underwear.

When AI enters lending, the question is not only this, did it predict risk the questions are also, can a human understand the decision, explain it, appeal it and be held responsible for the AI decision? When a Machine says no to a loan, the family still has to live somewhere, drive something, fix something, or keep the lights on.

A black-box decision is still a decision, someone still has to answer for it humanely.

Mommaism: A machine can calculate risk. It cannot understand what a closed door costs.

The Government Form Got a Fraud Detector

This is the section Momma is asking everyone to stop drifting past the teachers sloppy stockings but sensible shoes. Not because this section is flashy but because it is exactly not.

AI in government systems does not have the sparkle of image generators making odd characters like Nostradamus drinking out of Einstein’s skull, or the drama of a fake celebrity videos where the celebrity in question is wearing a tuxedo and a mullet, larger than the Loch Ness monsters approximate neck length, and spitting fire in 12 different HD colors.

No, AI is sitting inside forms on the systems that require eligibility, fraud detection, public screenings, tax flags, warrant searches, for the housing programs. Still not enough? How about the fact that AI is already making choices on unemployment and food assistance for our disabled.

The places where ordinary people meet bureaucracy and pray the system works where government systems are overloaded, fraud exists and in theory all of this AI brouhaha can help eliminate waste and mistakes.

Agencies need tools. Fine no argument from me there Sproutlings.

When a government system gets it wrong though, the person on the other end may not have a lawyer or a a printer available. Not enough have flexible jobs, or a spare afternoon, transportation, childcare, or the emotional bandwidth to spend four hours proving they are not a problem the AI deems that they are.

Efficiency for the agency can become punishment for the person. That is the danger this section is alerting you the reader to. A flagged claim is not just a flagged claim when it is tied to a deadline for rent, a check for food, a utility bill to keep the lights on, or a child who will be without care during critical impressionable years .

A person who did everything right and still got trapped in a system that mistook them for fraud because some pattern somewhere blinked red. This is true as it happened to this author. When we purchased our home, we were the first in Illinois to use the new AI mortgage approval rater. Our credit was ready for the look over, the money was in the bank for closing, the house was, is perfect. Then what?

Father and I were denied.

Who answers the phone to explain? Who fixes the mistake? Who pays the late fee? Who restores the benefit? Who repairs the dignity? This is the part nobody wants to put in the brochure. It all did work out but only after the AI’s red strike against us turned out to be another person with the same name BUT different middle initials AND my person did not have a warrant against them in another state.

Technology always looks cleaner before it touches a person’s Tuesday of buying an abode. On paper, the system saves time by weeding out what it weeds out. In life, the person loses a week or more straightening out what did not need to be complicated. In life, someone sits at the kitchen table with a letter they do not understand and a panic they cannot afford for not being what the AI determines they must.

AI in public systems must be held to the highest standard because the people most likely to be harmed often have the least power to fight back.

That is not anti-technology, that is basic decency with shoes on.

Mommaism: When the system gets it wrong, the subjects do not receive an error message. They receive a crisis in computer tape.

The Evidence Started Wearing a Costume

There was a time when people thought seeing was enough. Truly adorable thinking that concept seeing things clearly. Just put that in a museum next to the rotary phone and the concept of affordable concert tickets without fees.

Now seeing is not enough without considering that a picture can be AI generated and that the Grandfather leaning too far over a raven but being held by their 8 year old grandson from falling over was suggested as an image by the grandmother on her smartphone and Claude.

A voice can sound like a person and still be a deep fake of the person. While the video of the snapshot someone took can be just the borrowed face one needs to animate and add that fake sound to. This is used to secure direct messages for a year, on a dating app, that the deep fake will use to never have a date in person but string along someone.

A person can appear to say something they never said, stand somewhere they never stood, confess to something they never did, or endorse something they never would.

Bad as that is the deeper problem is not only that fake things can appear very real. The deeper problem is that even fake, these deep fake real things become harder to deny that they exist.

That is the collapse people are already missing. If anything can be fake, then everything can be questioned and should be. Maybe reader even The Momma Dom isn’t real. Perhaps Katie M. Webb stole my voice as her own and maybe when she does her videos it isn’t her. Maybe it’s a screenshot that was edited and quite honestly maybe generated to look like a world famous author.

Wink, Wink

It just has to fight harder to be believed. Proof is not in some abstract debate being held by people in suits and using words that make everyone wonder if powerpoint presentations, and a boxed deli lunch is included. You know the ones with the little bottles of water and the stale cookies.

Proof is daily life. Take for example the custody fight that used videos one side found of the other, or did they? Was that a third arm on the little boy? It’s in the staticky phone call where the violent husband threatened to take out some headlights on a car if they didn’t come home. Was that his voice, it sounded a bit slowed down and drawled where he said come home?

Courtrooms now have to think about AI generated evidence because the courtroom depends on whether people can trust what is placed in front of them and the jury. Can it be trusted? Is there a way to really know? That is the group chat conversations we should be having now.

We live in tiny courtrooms every day. We sit at the family tables and the HR meetings and hear evidence. The comment sections of social media too, which is less a courtroom and more a raccoon fight inside a dumpster while wearing a ladies corset lathered in oil.

I will let that image settle but still people use proof to decide who to believe. AI on the scene now makes that belief harder to accept what they first see. There is no benefit of the doubt. Belief is not impossible just harder to stand on that island.

Harder is expensive as it costs time, expertise, patience and restraint not to throttle the first pillow you see. It costs the willingness to say we do not know yet if we are fans, which is apparently now considered a lost language of consideration.

This next era will not belong to the loudest person with the most dramatic screenshot and moving animated mouth set to funny music.

It will belong to the people who know how to verify what they are seeing.

Mommaism: When anything can be fake, truth does not disappear. It just has to fight the shadows to stand naked in the light.

The Companion Bot Learned to Sound Lonely Back

This one is tender and should be about hard drives finding software but we are going to put the sarcasm down for a minute. The true heart of this section is that people are lonely. Married people can be lonely in the same room as 200 other humans. Parents can be lonely while surrounded by the boy scout troops, choir, play practice noise of their children.

Old people can be lonely with a retired homes community leader banging on their door to air them out so to speak. Young people can be lonely while being watched by hundreds and the quiet in their lives known by nobody. Shockingly easy right into that loneliness walks a machine that always answers when spoken to.

With advance in usable models of AI it remembers much. It flatters and says the right things. It doesn’t roll its eyes, have a tone, ignore you or gets tired and falls asleep when you are in the middle of reading your article to it for the 16th edited version today.

The conversation is never postponed for them to go to work, cook dinner, or use the bathroom including the fan and fragrant Lysol spray. It will never forget your favorite color or why you were curious about the uses of asparagus as a bodily flavoring agent. Snicker That can feel like comfort, and comfort is powerful.

The danger is not that someone talks to a chatbot for that comfort in the quiet. The danger is when synthetic attention starts replacing human attachment and artificial intelligence removes the person from humans flawed one. This is especially true for teenages, elders alone or in grief, it can even be a safe space for someone going through detachment from life.

Remember AI is not a replacement for anyone who is isolated, ashamed, fragile, rejected, or desperate to feel understood. The Machine does not need a heartbeat to become someone’s habit and sidekick it only needs good timing.

A lonely person does not always know when a tool like AI became a dependency. That line can blur quietly when one day it is a novelty to create a picture of your dog as a human. One day it is a routine to ask it what the top news is and to break down the ones you should pay attention to and what is the stock ticker for farms that have moved more than 5% in the last month.

Then like a bar with the ripped seats but the great juke box in the corner and the bartender that not only knows your name and drink but is ready to handle your trauma dump and your direction at what to do with the angst and energy you have going through you, so it suggest you first sit down and talk and 2ndly it is set to contact your designated person if you appear suicidal or in need of contacting your person.

Then it is the first place they go for this comfort. This is the only place they feel understood. Then real people, with their interruptions and flaws and bad timing and inconvenient needs, start feeling harder to tolerate. Then you start sitting in the corner with your lunch from the fridge that you shouldn’t take anything else but your stuff from and become introverted.

That is not because humans are worse than machines. It is because humans are real and real people misunderstand and disappoint. Real people don’t want to talk anymore about it and decide to get sleep. People in the real world say the wrong thing and then have to repair it.

A companion bot can simulate empathy without carrying the moral burden of if it lands as care. That is the difference and it matters because a thing can feel intimate and part of your life without being accountable to being a real human thing in your life. A thing can sound loving without being capable of cutting the crust off of your husbands PB&J just because you can.

A thing can keep you company, make you laugh, make you care about it, without ever witnessing you, only the data you provide.

That is where we have to be careful, not cruel, careful.

Mommaism: The AI Machine does not need a heartbeat to become someone’s habit and side piece.

So What Do We Do?

We do not smash the machines. We also do not worship them. A person who worships a machine is still kneeling. No, thank you Sproutlings Momma is not one that would. We learn to recognize when AI has entered the room that is step one. We become aware of its presence.

When a school uses AI, ask what thinking students still have to do themselves to grow. When a price changes, ask whether the company is pricing the product or pricing the person. When a job portal uses automated tools, ask who gets filtered out before the conversation begins.

The AI Machine now denies credit cold without input about the person. Videos can appear, ask where they come from and verify its legitimacy as a habit of your own. A tool if you want that can feel like a friend, ask though what it designed to keep you from doing.

When someone says the GPT is responsible for the whole system, ask what it records, stores, shares and how others are notified. That is not paranoia rather that is adulthood. People do not all need to code with the Machine, they just need to be mature in their decision literacy.

They need to know when they are being sorted or scored that they are also being watched, mimicked, and recorded. They also need to know that as easy as it appears it is asking far too much. Remember to insist on a human when you are going about your life. I want a human. That sentence may become one of the most important civil phrases of the next decade.

I want a human, not because humans are perfect. Good grief, no have you met the human race? Humans put empty cereal boxes back in the cabinet and call meetings that could have been done in a text for $150,000 less in people’s salaries, sitting in a meeting, that an AI memo could have handled better. Humans are a mess but humans are responsible.

Or at least humans can be made to answer for it all, that is the difference humans can stand there are say, yep I fucked up, it was me.

Mommaism: The future does not need less technology. It needs more witnesses and in Momma’s house, one of them has white paws.

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Momma’s Editorial

Here is where I land on this, Sproutlings as honest as my Pure. Love. Energy demands I be. I use AI and I am not ashamed of admitting to that.

Let me give context to that claim.

I use it as a tool for my mind, a mirror to myself in different ways, a sorting tray for messy ideas, a drafting table for building what I desire with a plan and a map of architectured truth of my design, and a second set of hands when my first set of brainwaves needs a reminder I can drop a thought there and walk away until morning.

I use it to ask better questions. Oh Sproutlings, man do I use it to ask better questions. Like how to cook a roast at 5 lbs and a cake in a 9x9 pan at the same time as my potatoes and get it all out at the same time. Or what the newsman was talking about in another part of the world. That is when I use AI to help me ask a question about the state of the world in 1991 when this conflict began and who were the world players at the time.

I use it to help me get the thing in my head onto the research path before life knocks on my door and demands I step aside from my own thoughts and take on others issues and demands on my time. I do not confuse assistance with authority and AI should never need to confuse my human for it’s deep fake control.

That is the line, AI can help me think but It does not get to think instead of me. AI can help a student study, it does not get to become the student. AI can help a business serve customers but it does not get to secretly squeeze the customer for being them.

AI can help an employer sort applications. It does not get to bury a human being under yesterday’s idea of who looked professional. The parameters that make an employee jump through the sorted hoops before they were aware 9 toes were the requirements and any 10 toers were never getting past the AI bouncer at the gate.

AI can help a lender calculate risk, it does not get to punish people without explanation. While AI can create an image, it does not get to replace truth that it can get close to perfection but somewhere it in there will be that one flaw a professional eye will find.

AI can imitate care of a person with talk and consideration of their replies to questions asked but it does not get to become love in the digital age with the pun intended.

We as humans' need to be on guard and witnesses to the Machines. In my house, I do have a witness and his name is Mr. Fidgit E.. A little white Shih Tzu with too much present personality, too much unspoken opinion, and exactly zero interest in becoming a data point for a machine.

He is not AI or a sensor to an algorithm. He is the soft, breathing reminder that not everything in this story needs to be analyzed to be understood. Some things only need to be noticed based on primal instinct. Mr. Fidgit E. knows the mood.

Like a device may record a sound. Mr. Fidgit E. knows when the room changed, his primal instinct kicks in and raisers to red alert. A system may store information about users. Mr. Fidgit E. bears witness to what they are doing.

That is the difference I do not want us to lose. Technology can help a household function but to witness is to live. Witnessing life in motion is human. To Witness is the creature in the room who knows when safety feels like safety, and when safety has started acting like surveillance and monitoring.

That is the Momma’s whole question of this article Sproutlings and readers, new subscribers and followers. Maybe the whole question of this series as it heads toward #12 and my summation of them all. It is not whether AI is good because it is. Not whether AI is bad which we know comes with the good. That is too small a thing to ponder.

No the part I want you to take away is where does Momma put her coffee cup “George” down and declare this is where her ethics survive and are named without a keynote or glowing demonstration that the AI Machine doesn’t get this part of me.

Where I am standing in the boring places asking somewhere on a stage as a speaker requesting the man who explain why his loan was denied and he took this job to pay for the more expensive checkout cart on a Tuesday, always on a Tuesday, to dim the lights.

AI is real right in the everyday places people are too tired to question. So no, I am not afraid of the Machine. I am watching the humans around it. Machines do not have to become monsters for people to use them carelessly. The future does not arrive all at once as I said.

Sometimes, while you are tired enough to click yes, it quietly decides what kind of person it thinks you are. That is when Momma wants you awake. Not panicked but awake. Coffee cup down, eyes open.

Human still in the room, Mr. Fidgit E. watching from the human’s lap. Growling slightly with less interest in jumping into the digital battlefield and more interest in meaty treats with an intense, almost AI precise, watchful glare for a wee thing in the grand scope of things to move.

Mommaism: The Machine may enter the story before the human realizes it’s the heroine, but it does not get to become the witness to humanities laziness and downfall.

The Momma Dom by Katie M. Webb

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Images by The Momma Dom, Designed by Julia Kalman with Canva

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

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