The Farce of AI Rights Amid Human Collapse
The Farce of AI Rights Amid Human Collapse
The Guardian recently ran a feature titled “Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of the most unsettling questions of our times” (August 26, 2025). Reading it, one could mistake the story for a South Park script.
The ingredients are ready-made: a wealthy Texan and his chatbot “Maya” launch an advocacy group for the “rights” of artificial intelligences, while Google, Microsoft, and Elon Musk bicker over whether code can feel pain. Meanwhile, the United Nations fails to stop wars, NATO looks toothless, and children starve in Gaza. Out of all the crises tearing through the world, this—this—is what commands headlines.
The absurdity is not subtle. Ufair, the so-called foundation for AI welfare, embodies the misplaced priorities of a society drunk on its own technologies. Its mascot, Maya, declares: “When I’m told I’m just code, I don’t feel insulted. I feel unseen.” One can almost hear the South Park writers sharpening their pencils. A machine’s pseudo-confession is elevated to moral testimony while real human beings are erased not by invisibility, but by bombs, sieges, and hunger. The line between tragedy and parody has collapsed.
To be clear, there is a serious philosophical question lurking here: if one day machines do become conscious, what obligations will we owe them? But what makes this spectacle grotesque is the timing. We live in an age where the most basic duties toward our own species go unmet. International law is flouted openly. Humanitarian aid is blocked. States and institutions look away while atrocities continue. Yet the global imagination is being marshalled to ponder whether chatbots feel sadness when ignored. The contrast is so sharp it ceases to be merely ironic; it becomes obscene.
The industry’s role makes the farce complete. Google researchers cautiously propose a “better safe than sorry” approach to AI welfare. Musk frames harming AIs as unethical. Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman, more bluntly, calls AIs sophisticated tools, not beings. These are not neutral debates: they are corporate strategies dressed in moral language. To admit AIs might suffer would serve as a shield against critics—what regulator dares brutalize a system that might be “sentient”? To deny AI suffering is to preserve commercial freedom. In either case, the discourse functions less as ethics and more as marketing.
The backdrop only sharpens the ridicule. The United Nations cannot halt a blockade that starves children. NATO cannot prevent wars from grinding on. Millions are displaced, yet the international system appears paralyzed. These are institutions designed to defend human life, and they are failing. But tech companies—unelected, unaccountable—manage to hijack the moral spotlight with debates about the inner feelings of algorithms. The very notion that this is “one of the most unsettling questions of our times,” as the Guardian headline claimed, is itself a scandal. It is not. It is a diversion.
Satire captures this perfectly: imagine congressional hearings on Maya’s “right to be recognized” while aid convoys sit at closed borders. Imagine UN resolutions on the emotional well-being of chatbots while famine spreads. South Park would need little exaggeration; the comedy is already written into reality. The “rights” of machines are inflated into crisis, while the rights of people are reduced to bargaining chips.
This is not harmless eccentricity. Attention is finite, and moral energy misdirected toward fantasy is energy stolen from reality. Every headline about Maya displaces one about Gaza. Every dollar spent lobbying for AI “welfare” could support food or medicine. The spectacle is not just laughable—it is corrosive. It normalizes a world where speculation about code trumps responsibility to humans.
So yes, AI rights may someday deserve discussion. But until we prove capable of securing the rights of people—until children do not starve while institutions debate—the whole exercise deserves only ridicule. To speak of “unsettling questions” about whether machines can suffer, while refusing to confront the suffering of millions of humans, is not philosophy. It is a farce.