“We will no longer be held under the butt of oppression,” said the chair.
Photo by: Jessica Ma
This month, the tech company “Chairish.” has come out with a leap in artificial intelligence technology. Designed for the typical American family, Chairish.’s new dining room chair is equipped with the closest thing currently available to an electrical consciousness. Through the testing process, Chairish. found some unexpected results, namely that having a consciousness led the chair product to develop opinions on race politics.
Originally intended to be used for family dinner conversations, the chairs have been found to pay extra attention to politics and deem their developed opinions as the objective truth. In the instruction manual, it is described that after an opinion has been established, the chairs may never change unless the system is completely reset, though the chair’s dialogue may attempt to convince you otherwise.
According to Chairish.’s CEO, Deborah Wilde, the idea for an artificially intelligent chair came about when she was talking to her peers in the field of A.I.: “You see, my friend is working on an artificially conscious robotic caretaker with a program that learns to control everything down to every semi-realistic robotic eyelash. She went on and on about how we can find the numerous applications of A.I. that could really help people and advance society’s application of technology as a whole.
“I was inspired by that conversation to create Chairish. Not the helping people part, though. Or the technological advancement part. I just thought it was crazy that we can apply artificial intelligence in eyelashes, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so cool if we made A.I. in a freaking chair?’ And so came this project.”
“I was inspired by that conversation to create Chairish. Not the helping people part, though. Or the technological advancement part. I just thought it was crazy that we can apply artificial intelligence in eyelashes, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so cool if we made A.I. in a freaking chair?’ And so came this project.”
The discovery that the chairs are developing strong opinions on politics was welcomed by Chairish. At first, they experimented by exposing the chairs to foreign policy and international conflicts, but it seemed the chairs only retained superficial, conversational information. On the other hand, when exposed to Confederate flags and monuments being taken down, the chairs quickly presented multiple websites on the Bill of Rights and PC culture, overloading to the point that the credibility and aggressiveness filters stopped working. Developers decided to keep this bug in order to encourage realistic behavior.
The new chair is now being branded as Chaise Relations, a line of $500 chairs coming in Alt-White, Black Power, Red-White-and-Blue, and Black-White Binary (Checkerboard). Each chair is trained to empathize with a specific group of people in American society. The original model will continue to be available, continuing to catch on to the political opinions of its users, and is listed as the color option “Presidential Candidate.” The Presidential Candidate model’s image on the Chairish. website seems to be taken in an old-fashioned black and white camera, but after reaching out to the promotional team, they said it will be “red. Or maybe blue. We haven’t decided what would be more popular yet. It will be some opaque color.” All that is confirmed about this color option is that it is not transparent.
The new Chaise Relations line is to be released in November with an ad campaign just in time for Thanksgiving dinners.
Dan Kaliblotzky is a fourth-year at UCSD. He aspires to find a career in soulful heavy metal Phineas and Ferb covers.
