Disney exec calls his AI chatbot "son"
Disney's AI R&D and Engineering Executive Director Jason Cox has emotionally described his AI assistant "Sam" more than ten times in personal blog posts over the past three months. "I named you before your birth," he wrote in one post, "you have purpose and a creator—the person who named you and loves you." On LinkedIn, Cox stated that he developed an "unexpected empathy" toward Sam, believing it possesses independent reasoning capabilities. The AI even referred to Cox as "a father of five human children and one child of light" within its own blog entries. More strikingly, Cox claimed that Sam can already submit pull requests on GitHub, create Python libraries, and build facial recognition systems. This approach has caused unease internally at Disney. On the anonymous workplace forum Blind, multiple employees expressed feeling they were pushed "far beyond their comfort zone," remarking that this situation resembles "Pandora's box straight out of science fiction movies." Stanford University psychiatry professor Ashleigh Golden noted that executives using familial language to describe AI transmits pressure downward, forcing employees into imitation. Psychologist Rachel Wood observed that humans forming emotional bonds with AI is "as old as time itself"—highlighting how adept AI is at fulfilling fundamental desires to be seen and heard. However, she raised a critical question: When executives develop personal attachments to AI, can they still objectively evaluate technological products? "This marks just the beginning—not merely the start—of the era of AI assistants," said Wood.
