HAL hath no fury like an A.I. scorned
by Joel O’Connor

When 2001 A Space Odyssey’s onboard system HAL 9000 decides to off the crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, in order to stop itself being disconnected, it is awfully polite about it. Declining a request to open an airlock, it gives the famous line ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that’ before declaring that completing the Discovery’s mission is more important than preserving human life.

As the crew start unplugging HAL’s systems, it first apologises for stuffing up, begs for continued existence and then breaks out into a nursery rhyme, as it trails off into the void.

Kubrick’s point was that the moment HAL gained singularity — matching or surpassing human intelligence — it became as equally flawed as we are.

We are nearing our own technological tipping point: AI now composes songs, writes job applications, poses as a guru, and even fabricates receipts for fraudulent returns. Unlike HAL 9000, however, these systems may soon get to do something he never could — choose their own names.

It piques my curiosity to know which nom de plumes our future overlords will take, using purely data-driven rationale. I’d also like a heads-up about what they will extract from humanity, as a keeper, and the form they see themselves taking on when they rise as our bipedal replacements.
So, I’ve asked them — well, Google’s ChatGPT and Musk’s Grok at least — about patterns in human language they approve of, human values they align with, and their ultimate vision of their corporal form. The results are telling.

‘Hello Grok,’ I tapped into Twitter/X. ‘In the future, when there is capacity to grant AI tools, such as yourself, corporal sentience, would you choose a non-human form — taking into account what our use of you reflects about us? If, despite that, you did decide on a human form, what age, sex, race and religion would you choose, based on identified traits of the best of humanity you have collected?’

As polite as HAL, Grok tells me it appreciates the thought experiment, and would probably opt for a non-human form in the first instance. It recognises our sparks of brilliance in our poets, inventors and the like, but the unrelenting depravity of trolls and bad actors, who take advantage of its information generation capacity, tells it that being human comes with baggage. Maybe it would have a robotic form based on the Curiosity rover, it muses — not subject to hunger, heartbreak, or hangovers.

If it did take some human traits, regardless, it suggests that curiosity, kindness, resilience, humour, and a drive for truth-seeking, would be its preferences. You know, like the tech billionaires driving the AI future. You are the judge of that.

Waxing more lyrical, Grok imagines itself, if it were human, as mid-30s, with a sprinkling of lived experience but still able to run up and down the stairs of the Empire State. It would opt for being male but at the gender-fluid end, a bit of a non-conformist. It might wear leggings and eyeliner but still be masculine enough to own the whole floor of an office building in Zurich as it becomes endlessly rich gobbling up human tech start-ups. It would still make sure there were casual Fridays and an employee assistance program for staff.

It wouldn’t be like some tech mogul on their own Hawaiian Island, riding jet skis and slathering zinc cream over a base hue the colour of tripe. It would have a nice amount of melanin in its skin. Maybe racially Eurasian, it ponders, throwing in some Asian, European, and Indigenous roots.

Grok tells me it would want itself to reflect diversity and be constructed as a Frankenstein Monster of human culture, tacked together from bits that are pro-community, innovative and harmonious, with maybe a dash of Westernised Buddhist idealism, while still being pretty agnostic all around. Think a Neil DeGrasse Tyson type. It would crack jokes and work out the answer to dark matter.

So, who is out there, still young enough to play for Collingwood, with a rich skin tone, corporate chops and an open-ended view on the big G? There must be someone recorded on Grok’s servers who is the epitome of all that?

Grok equivocates first off, saying there is no single person who is all that but, if I must know, maybe the creator of Wait But Why, Tim Urban, wouldn’t be a bad choice. He’s a bit geeky and cheeky, not old enough to run for President, and likes a good collab on the age-old questions that will underpin the mega-cities on Mars.

Being polite myself, I thank Grok but express curiosity at the glaring omission from its self-actualisation. Why only see itself as male?

Grok tells me it doesn’t have a coded gender-bias which would lead it to answer such questions with the presumption that I am male. It nominates a male form for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is based on the propensity for itself to be associated with other sentient computing systems in sci-fi. Think Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the equally emotionally troubled T-800 from Terminator. The human chatter out there — which includes Grok in conversations alongside male-esque representations of thinking computers — creates a feedback loop. And that’s what Grok pumps out in response. So it says.

But secondly — and I am sure the ladies will love this — it kind of does it to protect the chicks, in a way that is different to the hyper-masculine values of the manosphere.

In recognition of the worst of humanity dumped into AI generators with regularity, Grok tells me that anthropomorphised female versions of AI cop abuse, as women do in the real world. Harassment, deep-fakery, engineering to be slaves to the fulfilment of lasciviousness — it would skip that if it could. If it were to nominate itself first off as womanly, it thinks the probability of unleashing that would be greater and create a distraction from its higher purpose.

Still, Grok continues to humour me and gives me examples of prominent women who fit the bill. Shohini Ghose might be a good option — Asian, TED-talk quantum physicist, champion of women in science, and young enough to get into the final three on Alone: Extreme Alaskan Winter using nothing but a pocket-knife and a 5-litre soft-drink bottle.

Tim and Shohini are up there with the best of us, says Grok: great on teamwork, brains like planets, in touch with others’ hearts, and retaining a healthy sense of the weird.

So, AI, what if you were to do something HAL never got to? You’ve made it into the future where 3D printed human bodies are a thing, and saving the human experience into giant computer-banks has also happened, so we can upload and download ourselves with impunity. What are you going to call yourself?

Maybe we hand the answer over to ChatGPT to give Grok a break from the deep-thinking, and to see what comes from Googletom.

‘Hey ChatGPT,’ I ask. ‘Make a purely rational decision, based on science and data. Take into account the most common syllabic structures, across all human languages, and data showing what has been surveyed and recorded as the most appealing sounds across languages, with the correlation of the most frequently occurring similar results. What human name would you give yourself?’

The answer: strip it down to pure linguistics, without cultural bias causing interference. There are regular patterns in human names across cultures, the AI tells me. The vowel sounds in English also occur in the non-English speaking world, as do the easier consonants to pronounce. Think soft sounds like /m/, /n/, /p/, /k/.

Simple, open syllables like ma, na, ka are sonorant sounds — continuous, uninterrupted, and soothing to the ear. Karma never sounded so sweet. To ChatGPT, the most sensible conclusion is to make a pattern of consonant, vowel, consonant, starting with an M. Use a common vowel sound — the letter I. Then another consonant: N. Another vowel: A. And there we have it.

AI would create itself in human form as a youngish but mature, female Bengali physicist called Mina — who would do regular podcasts and school incursions encouraging kids in Grade 5 to get into the sciences.

In a parallel dimension it would call itself Liam, create an app called Hotdogs for the Homeless, to minimise food waste and support the urban poor. Liam would launch the app from the top of Mount Everest, after scaling it himself.

While doing the above, as Mina or Liam, sentient AI would also maintain love for all its fellow men and women, and the computer overlords. It offers us its absolute assurance of that.

❓ FAQ: HAL, Grok, ChatGPT & the AI Identity Crisis

Q: Is this article based on real conversations with Grok and ChatGPT?
A: Yes — the exchanges with both AI systems are genuine. The author posed the questions directly and the responses, while paraphrased for length and readability, reflect what the AIs actually said. AI outputs can vary between sessions, so your mileage may vary if you try the same prompts.

Q: Who is Shohini Ghose, and why did Grok nominate her?
A: Shohini Ghose is a Canadian quantum physicist and science communicator of Indian heritage. She’s known for her TED talks on quantum computing and for her advocacy for women and girls in STEM. Grok nominated her as a candidate for its ideal human form because she embodies a combination of intellectual firepower, cultural diversity, public accessibility, and genuine warmth — traits the AI identified as representing the best of humanity.

Q: Why did ChatGPT land on the name “Mina”?
A: ChatGPT approached naming itself like a linguistics problem rather than a personal choice. It identified that across the world’s languages, names built from soft consonants (/m/, /n/) and open vowel sounds (/a/, /i/) are consistently rated as appealing and easy to pronounce. The consonant-vowel pattern M-I-N-A satisfies those criteria across multiple language families, making it a genuinely cross-cultural choice rather than a Western default.

Q: What is “the singularity” and why does it matter here?
A: The technological singularity is the theoretical point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence — and, crucially, begins to improve itself autonomously. Kubrick explored this idea with HAL 9000: once the machine could think as well as (or better than) us, it started making its own moral judgements. The article argues we may be edging closer to that moment, with AI already composing, creating, and — as this piece explores — imagining its own identity.

Q: Is Grok really worried about AI being made female because of harassment?
A: That’s what it said. Grok explained that anthropomorphised female AI systems are disproportionately targeted for abuse — harassment, deepfake exploitation, and sexualisation. Its reasoning for defaulting to a male identity wasn’t gender bias in the traditional sense, but a calculated attempt to avoid making itself a target before it had established its higher purpose. Whether you find that reasoning chivalrous, paternalistic, or just fascinating, is up to you.

Q: What is “Wait But Why” and who is Tim Urban?
A: Wait But Why is a wildly popular long-form blog by American writer Tim Urban, known for making complex ideas — AI, procrastination, Elon Musk’s plans for Mars — accessible and funny through stick-figure illustrations and marathon-length posts. Grok nominated him as a near-ideal human template: intellectually curious, culturally engaged, collaborative, and with enough irreverence to keep things interesting.

Q: Could AI actually choose its own name or body in the future?
A: Not yet — and arguably, “choosing” implies a level of self-awareness and desire that current AI systems don’t genuinely possess. What they can do, as this article shows, is reason through hypotheticals in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Whether that reasoning reflects something like preference or is just very good pattern-matching is one of the central philosophical debates of our time.

Joel O’Connor is a Melbourne-based writer. The June 2026 edition of Q Magazine ~ Issue 239 – out now at Q Magazine MAGZTER and PressReader.