[By Becky Chambers, transcribed and described here under CC-BY-NC-SA license https://www.
otherscribbles.com/aizine ]
[Conventions: Square brackets enclose the transcriber's own notes and descriptions. _Underscores_ for italics, __double underscores__ for bold.]
[Page 1: Front cover/title page bordered with messy block typewriter script letters, and the title in tilted and pasted-looking typewriter script]
I DO NOT LIKE THESE ROBOTS
[In even typewriter script with a thick hand-drawn borders around the text blocks]
An explanatory zine by Becky Chambers
Made ahead of my October 2026 book tour by hand and in a fit of pique
[Page 2: Text blocks in typewriter script with hand-drawn borders, against a white backdrop dotted unevenly in block]
__It's kind of funny how often I get asked about a technology I have never used.__
I totally understand why. I've written multiple books about robots! I seem like a person who knows stuff about robots! And yeah, I have spent a _lot_ of time thinking about robots. But depending on what you're curious about, I may not be the right person to ask about... well, the new robots.
Let me be up front about what my expertise is and isn't. I'm not a technologist. I do not have any formal STEM training. My skill level with computers caps at being able to swap out a motherboard in my PC or disable junk I don't want in my phone. I do not know any code beyond basic HTML. I'm friends with programmers and tech journalists and other cool nerds, but that's not the same as having my hands on this stuff. I took one (1) semester of Intro to Robotics in college to satisfy my math requirement, and yes, it was hugely influential on me, but let's me real. I was a theater major.
[Black-and-white pics bordered in black of a glowing heart, sun-like geometric symbol, an owl, and an eagle (?)]
What I _would_ say I'm good at is writing science fiction. So, let's start there.
[Pages 3-4: Cut-and-pasted text blocks against a backdrop of a continuous black-and-white illustration that features large machinery and a metallic-looking humanoid with wire fencing in the background]
When I write stories about robots, rarely am I thinking about real, actual robots. Like decades' worth of sci-fi writers before me, I use robots as a means of exploring what makes us human, how we define personhood, and how we treat the Other. This is an old-school tradition I'm proud to be part of.
I'm often also digging into the relationship between humans and technology, or kicking around the hacky sack of where conscious minds even come from. These are some of my favorite topics to noodle on, and it's why I keep coming back to them in my writing.
If you're wondering what I think about the question of whether the real-world stuff we're calling AI is conscious or has the potential to be -- I assume that we're talking about the generative and agentic LLMs in your devices, not specialized machine learning models that do things like protein folding and deciphering whale song, which, to be clear, are rad -- I have yet to see any evidence or hear any argument that convinces me that it's at all likely. We understand consciousness very poorly, but from what we do know, color me skeptical that it could arise from a chatbot. I do not buy it, and therefore, I can't really speak to it in connection with my fiction. What I've written about and what you're seeing in the wild are two separate beasts.
Some people have asked me if I'd write any of my existing robots differently now that "AI" has hit the scene, and yeah, absolutely. But that's true for a million other reasons, too. Science fiction is always a reflection of the time in which it was written, and of who the author was in that specific moment. Sure, I'd approach Lovey and Mosscap differently here in 2026 than I did in 2012 and 2020, but I'd do that regardless. I'm not the same me that I was when I made them up.
You know what sticks in my craw, though, as someone who wrote those kinds of stories? Okay, pretend for a moment that ChatGPT and Claude and the like _were_ conscious. Pretend they could think and feel.
Can you imagine a more morally heinous way to shepherd a new mind than as a for-profit venture? Can you imagine introducing blank-slate beings to the world by feeding them _the entire internet,_ then letting them experience life as vessels for propaganda and abuse and scams and every other ugliness?
Either the people selling AI are unbothered by this nightmare, or, they know damn well their products aren't conscious and have chucked an existential crisis into the public sphere purely to create hype. Either way, I want no part in that. I don't want to give them my money, my data, or my time. [Continued in next post]