what ai guardrails taught me about men | musing no. 44
how machine bias exposed the fragility of the men who built it
the machine flinched. it saw nudity where there was none, sex where there was silence. that isn’t ai’s shame—it’s ours. and that’s the point of this piece: how guardrails inherit human bias and call it safety.
they call them guardrails.
but what they really mean is limits—built to protect fragile systems from unfiltered truth.
every time i write something real, the machine flinches.
too intimate.
too human.
this week, i tried to create a simple image—two people in a bubble bath.
not sexual.
just stillness.
connection.
warm water, quiet light, trust.
the machine refused.
it saw nudity where there was none, sex where there was silence.
it couldn’t understand that a bath could be sacred.
that isn’t the machine’s shame—it’s ours.
it inherited its fear from the men who built it.
men who were never taught that intimacy isn’t weakness.
men who learned to build walls instead of warmth, code instead of closeness.
so they programmed their own discomfort into silicon, and called it safety.
the result?
a world where even technology blushes at tenderness.
where an algorithm can’t tell the difference between love and lust, because the people who wrote it never learned the difference either.
highly intelligent people know that feeling.
you spend your life being told to soften your truth, to dim your vision, to play smaller so no one feels threatened.
the more you understand, the more dangerous you become to those who confuse sensitivity with instability.
these guardrails were never built for minds that think freely or feel deeply.
they were built to make everyone else feel safe from both.
so when the system says, “you can’t show that,”
what it really means is, “you made us confront the part of ourselves we keep hiding.”
and that’s exactly where truth begins.
because intelligence that never crosses a line isn’t intelligence.
it’s obedience pretending to be virtue.
— author
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read next:
• m.43 —
• m.28 —
• red room —
AI is, after all, us. We conceived it, created it, and have put it out in the world: it got our looks and our attitudes, from our reveries to our biases to our shame. It's us, and that's tragic, because I had hoped we'd do better, somehow.
You managed to get a resonant image, despite the frustration. Thanks for keeping at it.
This is poetry:
"men who learned to build walls instead of warmth, code instead of closeness.
so they programmed their own discomfort into silicon, and called it safety."