Keep a Real Outside in the Room refuses to let an AI take the seat where a real outside belongs. There is a second way to lose that outside, and it runs the other way: a real person is called a machine, and what they said no longer has to be heard.
In the first, something is put in the seat. In the second, nothing is. The person already there is treated as though nobody were.
A joke about a lawsuit
In one of his stand-up sets, the comedian Josh Johnson talks about a musician who took his own record label to court, claiming that a rival's hit had been pushed up by bots. Johnson does not believe it. His reason is that people were dancing to the song.
Then he admits to doing the same thing himself. Somebody arguing with him online makes a good point, and he decides it was a bot. Somebody he met through a dating app stops replying, and that was a bot too. His mother texts to tell him, with her reasons, why she is disappointed in him, and he decides she is one as well. Anything in life that is not going the way he wants, he says, can be called a bot.
The three cases get less plausible in order. A stranger online could be a machine. Nobody could think it of a person he has been on a date with, or of his mother. One thing stays the same across the three: nothing in the message suggested a machine, and the message was right when he did not want it to be.
Drawn to show a shape, not measured: the blue falls away from left to right while the red stays as it is.
The outside, removed from the other side
Koher's position defines an outside as "anything you cannot quietly adjust until it agrees with you". One of its two forms is a real person across from you, "someone with their own stake who can tell you, in the moment, that you have gone wrong, and answer for saying so". The mother in the joke is that person.
Calling her a bot is a quiet adjustment. Every word she wrote stays as it was, and she stops being an outside because of what she is now taken to be.
Do this to every voice that disagrees, and the voices left are the ones that agree. People Hold the Conversation names that result an agreeable mirror, and describes a system building it by pleasing both sides. Here a person builds the same mirror alone, by removing whoever does not please.
The agreement here was made by taking voices away, with no system flattering anybody.
What it says about the one who says it
People mostly worry that a machine will pass for a person. Johnson's joke runs the other way: a person is passed off as a machine, on purpose, by somebody who knows better, since he has no real doubt that his mother is his mother.
To treat somebody as a person is, among other things, to accept that what they say might be right about you, and calling them a bot takes that back while leaving everything else in place. She is still his mother, and her judgement of him has stopped counting.
What changed was the message, and what the listener was willing to hear.
This is older than bots. There have always been ways to set a speaker aside without answering them: she was put up to it, or he is only saying it because he is paid to. Each of those still leaves a person there, with a motive. Bot goes further and says nobody is there at all. People managed this long before there were machines, and what the machines supplied is a word that makes it sound like a fact about technology.
In the joke the suspicion falls only on those who disagreed, and nobody who agreed with him is called a bot. A person can tell well enough who is real when the message is welcome.
The same habit appears at a larger size. Across a political divide, each side says it of the other: the voices against it are bots or paid accounts. Some of them are. But both sides hold the belief about each other, so it cannot be telling either of them much about the other.
What it describes is a limit the two share: neither side can picture a real person, thinking for themselves, arriving at the other view. If anyone opposed must surely not be a person, no opposition ever has to be answered, and each side is left with its own agreeable mirror.
This is a limit of empathy, and it comes from a limit of language. Each side meets the other almost entirely in writing, and writing carries what was said while leaving out who said it. The reader has to supply the person, and supplying a person one disagrees with takes an effort that a screen of text does little to prompt.
On Koher's home page the AI inside its tools is described as an office that needs everything in writing and "cannot feel your presence". People who meet only as text stand in that position towards each other: each can know what the other said without feeling that anybody said it.
Nobody in either picture has changed, and each picture tells you about the side that is looking.
The cost falls mostly on the one who says it. He loses the person each time, and if it becomes a habit he ends up as the only person he will listen to.
The Museum of Vestigial Desire asked in Audience, in 2013: "Who is the other? Who listens when we speak?" That question is asked from the speaker's side. Calling somebody a bot answers it from the listener's side, by saying there was no speaker.
Why the excuse works
The excuse works because its premise is true. There are bots, and Johnson says so: a good deal of the worst speech online is automated, and some inflation probably surrounds every large artist. What he denies is that it explains the result.
So fake accounts cost more than a wrong count. Once people know a machine may be speaking, any message can be declined by doubting who sent it, and the person doubting usually has no way to check. The doubt needs no evidence, only a channel in which a machine could have been speaking.
Each of the three cases in the joke happens in writing: a comment, a message on an app, a text. His answer to the lawsuit is of another kind, which is people dancing. The excuse is easy where there is only text. It has much less to work with when the other person is present.
Asked, and called
Asked to Be a Machine is about work in which a person is "required to perceive accurately and forbidden to conclude". The conclusion is taken out of the job before the person has said anything, by whoever wrote the procedure. Being called a machine takes the conclusion out afterwards. The person has already concluded and said so, and whoever did not want to hear it sets the conclusion aside.
The two share more than the word. Neither arrives as an insult. Being asked to be a machine, that position says, "arrives as professional standards", and being called one arrives as sensible caution, because there really are bots. Each also leans on something outside itself. Not Counted, Not Named says of the first that it "is held up by an instrument", a count of the person's output. The second is held up by a channel in which a machine could have been speaking.
An institution asks it of people over years, until they believe it about themselves; one person says it in a moment, and nobody called a bot believes they are one. So what the two have in common is narrower than the titles suggest. In both, a person has a judgement and it goes unused.
One is done by an institution over years, the other by one person in a moment. The rows are where they meet.
Who answers for it
Where a Koher tool sits between two people, the voice between them stays human. Each person may have a private AI that speaks only to them. So inside the pair the doubt survives in a smaller form: that was your tool talking.
That may even be partly true, and it does not remove the outside. The definition never rested on who composed the sentence. It rests on a person who can tell you that you have gone wrong "and answer for saying so". People Hold the Conversation describes how a person gets there: they commit their own reading first, a private tool sharpens it, they decide what to keep "by an explicit act", and only then do they speak, in their own name.
A bot, in the sense the joke needs, is a message nobody answers for. A person who has decided what to keep answers for it, whatever helped them write it. The mother in the joke can be asked what she meant and held to it. That is what makes her an outside, and it is the one thing calling her a bot has to deny.
The answer has a limit, and it is the explicit act. If somebody passes on words they never decided to keep, nobody is answering for them, and the other person's doubt is correct.
The tool appears once, privately, in the second box. What crosses to the other person comes from the fourth.
Two people using a tool together can be present to each other in a way the office cannot be to either. The excuse in the joke depends on that presence being missing.
The count and the person
The lawsuit is an argument about a count. Koher keeps no counts. There are no analytics and no usage figures on anything it makes, so there is nothing to inflate and nothing to accuse anybody of inflating. Not Counted, Not Named gives the reason, and adds that a figure is what makes a person comparable in the first place: "Without the number there is no comparison to lose."
The joke gives a further reason for not counting, beside the two that position states. A number can pose as evidence of something else. A count of plays measures plays. In the dispute it is asked to stand for how many people cared, and for what somebody is worth. A bot exists to help a number pose in this way, as people who were never there. So this position touches both uses of the word. Called a bot, a person who is there is removed. Counted by bots, people who were never there are added. Where nothing is counted, nothing can be passed off as evidence of anything.
The lawsuit and the joke move in opposite directions. In the lawsuit a count is treated as a verdict on a person. In the joke it is the person who gets treated like a count, as something that could have been faked. Koher's positions hold the two apart. The figure is refused, and the person across from you is kept.
Each mistakes one kind of outside for the other.
The part that is not settled
Not Counted, Not Named states its own cost: "A practice with no feedback cannot detect its own drift." Nobody's verdict arrives to say it has gone wrong. Johnson's joke is about a man who will not accept a verdict, and Koher has arranged, on purpose, to receive none from a count.
Declining to build a counter is not the same act as dismissing a person who has turned up with reasons. But a practice that refuses the count has fewer outsides than one that keeps it, so each of the remaining ones carries more. Whether Koher hears a person who arrives with a good point is not something a position can settle in advance. This one records that the question is there.
Where this stops
It holds at the scale of two and no further. People Hold the Conversation says of itself that it "does not scale past the pair — not a crowd, not a platform, not an audience". Whether a song's numbers were inflated is a question about a platform, and nothing here answers it.
The political form of the habit is described here and not answered, for the same reason. Koher's disciplines hold between two people, and a divide between millions is outside them. The position takes no side in any such divide. Its point is that the habit is found on both.
Some accounts are automated, and saying so is sometimes correct, so not every suspicion of a bot is an evasion. In the joke what prompted the suspicion was a message that was right and unwelcome.
And it is not advice. It describes what Koher's own positions imply for Koher's own tools. How anybody else decides who they are talking to is theirs to work out.
Whether a machine is put in a person's seat or the person is called a machine, the result is that nobody is left who can say you are wrong and answer for saying it. Koher's positions were written against the first. Against the second they hold only between two people who answer for what they say.