this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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I believe a lot of the reason people hate LLM chatbots is that we are being actively, knowingly misled by corporations into believing that they, like Data, have the capacity to reason and learn and to understand what they know and what they do not know, when they are just word salad bots. These tools are being pushed on us even though we largely do not want to use them and they produce shoddy lower-quality work while putting actual people out of work, in order to justify the capital expense, because it makes more profit for them, while all friction and risk of using these tools is assumed by the user.
Pulaski's prejudice against Data doesn't make sense in the show because Data is decidedly not a clanker, but it is forgiveable if we believe that she has had past run-ins with fraudulent LLM-like AIs that do a good job of looking like Data but lack these capacities, and perhaps were pushed by similarly unethical entities.
But on the other hand, a lot of the issues with AI in 2026 would not apply in the Federation of the 24th century, because there is no capitalism or scarcity-based economy that would justify compelling people to use such a flawed tool. Also, the ship's computer in the Enterprise is already far more capable and useful than an LLM chatbot, and no one ever marvels at its capabilities in-universe. So given these things, her hostility towards Data is still puzzling.
Doesn’t she eventually come around to him? I really think she’s just a moral lesson in character form. Even in trek people aren’t perfect when expressed to new things but have the opportunity to grow. If everyone behaved perfectly at the introduction of every new stimulus then there would be no growth and that is not good storytelling.
Oh I agree 100% with this being good writing with this very intent, was strictly trying to justify her prejudice purely in-universe.
Ah gotcha. I get the whole trying to explain in universe motives but sometimes I feel like that sort of thing needs too much detail and feels like it reaches too far. But for that exercise… hmmm… my Worfs razor would be that she is genuinely, to her core, all about life and healing it. Maybe just humans but that would introduce another personality flaw, but we’ll say just life. But it needs another angle because it’s not enough to simply be so pro-something that you become anti something else (without negative personality traits like racists), so maybe she had an experience when younger that really showed her that the computer that talks to her wasn’t alive and over time those two perspectives created the riff that we see when she meets Data. So close to your explanation I guess lol
Mind you it’s been a minute since I watched tng.
There’s still scarcity in the Federation, just not for the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, entertainment).
Not everyone gets their own Château Picard! Not everyone gets to be a starship captain!
Starfleet examinations are brutally hard. There is plenty of incentive for people to cheat to get ahead.
Maybe she's just robophobe. Can't fix that shit
Building her entire personality around being a biological entity... echoes of TERFdom.
And actually she is a closeted robosexual.