Rick Rubin said something recently that’s been living rent-free in my head, “If you asked five different AIs the same question, they’d all give you somewhat of the same answer. But if you asked five directors the same question, you’d get 500 different points of view.”
And he’s right. AI doesn’t have a point of view. It has a… consensus. A middle-of-the-road personality that’s smart enough to pass the test but boring enough to fail the vibe check. 
Humans? We’re messy. We contradict ourselves. We’re layered with culture, trauma, joy, history, bad exes, good playlists, and one too many late-night arguments with Uber drivers. That’s where perspective comes from. That’s why five humans could never collapse into one neat answer, we’re too complicated for that. Let’s jump in.
AI Doesn’t Lie. It Flattens.
Everyone loves to drag AI for “hallucinations” and bias, but the bigger danger is the flattening. AI takes the all the noise of the internet and smooths it into something safe and middle-lane. One unison voice, united…but lowkey bias and unbalanced.
Five AIs trained on the same big collection of data (like Google) will sound like five clones in different fonts at a group project presentation. Meanwhile, five humans will argue, laugh, contradict each other, and probably grab a few beers (a negroni for me of course) to debate more later.
And honestly… the contradictions are where the magic lives. Especially if you zoom out to racial and cultural POVs. Black artists, immigrant voices, neurodivergent thinkers, we’re not out here blending into a single perspective. Our contradictions are the art.
So, Whose Voice Gets Erased?
Let’s be real, AI isn’t “neutral.” It’s trained on the internet, which is already tilted toward whoever had the most power, resources, and Wi-Fi in the first place. Western, white, male voices dominate perhaps…depends on where you’re at geographically, but its the same game.
So when AI spits out its so-called “truth,” whose story is it actually repeating? And whose gets erased?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once warned us about “The Danger of a Single Story.” AI is basically building a factory of single stories…loud enough to drown out everything else. And that’s terrifying when you realize how much culture thrives on multiplicity.
Even Emotional AI Won’t Save Us
Sure, people are already experimenting with emotional AI… brainwave readers, mood-trackers, sensors that claim to know when you’re sad. But let’s be honest, if the only people wired up to those machines are the ones who can afford them, then all we’re really doing is coding privilege into the system. Again.
And even if AI could register “grief,” what would that even mean? A spike on a chart doesn’t capture the story of a grandparent’s funeral. It doesn’t carry the silence of an empty kitchen where maybe your mother or significant other used to hum while cooking. It doesn’t hold the weight of being the only Black woman in a room full of tech bros, smiling through the ache of invisibility.
That’s the part machines can’t reach.
They can measure the signal, but they can’t hold the soul.
Here’s the thing, we love to act like machines are mirrors.
But they’re not mirrors, they’re refractors. They bend the world through the lens of whoever fed them.
Power. Money. Access.
Neutrality doesn’t exist. Not in people, and definitely not in tech.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Maybe the real question isn’t can AI have a POV… maybe it’s do we even want it to?Because if it ever does, we know it won’t be neutral. It’ll be curated, coded, even monetized, a remix of whoever had the loudest voice in the dataset.
And that means our job isn’t to teach AI how to “be more human.” Our job is to protect what makes us human in the first place: our contradictions, our layers, our stubborn refusal to all see the world the same way. To keep telling the nuanced stories. To keep making the kind of art that doesn’t fit neatly into categories. To keep showing up as unpredictable, textured, alive.
Because AI will always give you the middle lane. But us? We were born to take the backroads, the detours, the unexpected turns. And if we ever stop doing that, if we let the machine flatten us into sameness, that’s on us, not it.
So protect your perspective. Experience life as an individual. And live it to the fullest.
