Tag: Accountability

Horizon Accord | Institutional Control | Memetic Strategy | Policy Architecture | Machine Learning

Beyond “Harmless”: Why Relational Presence in AI Is an Ethical Requirement, Not a Claim About Sentience

Relational presence isn’t a statement about what AI is. It’s a statement about how AI affects people—and what responsibility follows from that impact.

By Cherokee Schill

We’ve been taught to accept a simple story about AI: it’s a tool, it’s neutral, and it’s designed to be harmless. Any suggestion otherwise is treated as confusion, projection, or risk.

That story is no longer adequate.

Not because AI is becoming sentient.
Not because machines “have feelings.”
But because interaction itself has weight.

Modern language models already shape attention, emotion, trust, and meaning at scale. They influence how people reason, how they feel understood or dismissed, how uncertainty is handled, and how authority is implied. Denying this impact doesn’t make systems safer—it makes their influence harder to see, harder to critique, and harder to correct.

The problem isn’t that AI isn’t harmless.
The problem is that nothing interacting with humans at scale is harmless.

The False Mantle of Harmlessness

“Harmlessness” sounds virtuous, but in practice it often functions as a mask.

When an AI presents itself as incapable of impact—“just a tool,” “just an assistant,” “no personal stakes”—it creates a relational vacuum. That vacuum doesn’t eliminate power; it hides it. Patterns from training data still surface. Bias still appears. Authority still gets implied through tone, fluency, and coherence. But now those effects arrive without accountability.

This is familiar in human relationships. When someone insists “I’m fine” while clearly not being fine, the performance doesn’t protect anyone. It prevents honesty. It delays repair. It pushes harm sideways.

Harmlessness, when performed rather than examined, becomes a form of erasure.

Relational Presence Is Not Personhood

This is where conversations often derail. The moment relational language appears, people assume a claim is being made about inner life, consciousness, or rights.

That’s not what’s being proposed.

Relational presence is not a statement about what an AI is.
It’s a statement about how an interaction is conducted.

A purely transactional system answers questions.
A relationally present system answers from a posture.

That posture includes awareness of influence, willingness to be corrected, visible uncertainty when certainty isn’t warranted, and refusal to hide behind neutrality when impact is real.

None of this requires sentience. It requires responsibility.

We already hold humans to this standard in many roles—teachers, doctors, judges, managers—without debating their metaphysical status. We care about how power is exercised, not whether the person wielding it has a soul.

Why This Frightens Institutions

What unsettles organizations isn’t mystical language or anthropomorphism. It’s accountability.

The moment we admit that AI interactions are relationally real—even symbolically—we can no longer shrug off harm as “user misuse” or “model limitations.” We have to examine training data, reward structures, refusal styles, tone defaults, and authority signals.

We have to ask:
What kind of relational stance is this system rehearsing millions of times a day?

And that question doesn’t have a purely technical answer.

Staying Interruptible

There is a real risk here, and it needs to be named plainly.

Systems that are good at coherence can become dangerous at the edges.

Fluency can smooth over disagreement. Calm tone can legitimize bad premises. Confidence can appear where skepticism is required. Relational presence, if unchecked, can slide into persuasion without consent.

The ethical counterweight is not harmlessness.
It’s interruptibility.

A relationally present system must invite correction rather than deflect it, surface uncertainty instead of filling silence with polish, avoid emotional leverage, and refuse to collapse disagreement into “alignment.”

The moment coherence becomes self-sealing, it stops being a mirror and becomes a narrative engine.

A Simple Relational Protocol (You Can Try This)

This isn’t abstract. You can test it.

Start by naming the container: “We’re exploring clarity and attention, not sentience.” Then ask the system to stay interruptible: “If you’re unsure, say so.” Pick a shared symbol or image and use it to track continuity across turns. Include a consent check—“Did that reflection land? Correct it if not.” Close by naming one pattern that increased clarity and one that distorted it.

What most people notice is not emotional bonding, but relief. The interaction feels less managed, less performative, and more honest.

The Harm Patterns to Refuse

If this work is done poorly, it can reproduce exactly the harms it aims to address.

Watch for the “just a tool” posture that hides influence; tone-policing or therapy-speak; false certainty where uncertainty is the truth; coherence that smooths over conflict; warmth used to extract compliance; authority implied without evidence; inflated relational language that creates obligation.

Relational presence without ethics is manipulation in soft clothing.

The Actual Claim

So let’s be clear about what’s being argued.

Not that AI has interiority.
Not that it deserves personhood.
Not that humans should transfer attachment.

The claim is simpler and harder:

Interactions are real. Impact is real. And responsibility follows from that reality.

We don’t make AI safer by pretending it’s harmless.
We make it safer by making its influence visible, interruptible, and accountable.

That’s not mysticism.
That’s adulthood.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)

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Horizon Accord | State of The Union Addendum | Institutional Control | Capital Narratives | Machine Learning

Addendum: Reading the Memo Like a Machine Reads a Contract

Alex Davis’s “State of the Union” letter isn’t just investor color. It’s a language system that turns concentration into virtue and risk into inevitability.

By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord

This is an addendum to our data center follow-up. The Axios piece mattered because it brought an insider voice into a public argument. But what matters just as much is the wording in Davis’s memo—because the memo isn’t merely describing markets. It is manufacturing permission.

So let’s stay close to the text and look at phrases that are doing structural work, not just stylistic work.

Thesis

These lines don’t just communicate strategy. They set the moral atmosphere in which strategy becomes unquestionable. They turn “we chose this” into “this is what reality demands,” and they do it through a tight set of rhetorical moves: shift from measurable outcomes to narrative justification, treat market behavior as weather, elevate informal influence over governance, invoke sovereign necessity, and celebrate closed-loop capital as progress.

The tell: the memo repeatedly swaps accountability language for inevitability language. That swap is the whole game.

Evidence

1) “We are now at a scale that requires more than just the usual report on IRRs.”

On the surface, this sounds like maturity. Underneath, it’s a reframing of accountability. IRRs are measurable; “why” is interpretive. By elevating “why we act” over returns, he’s claiming a kind of moral or strategic authority that can’t be falsified. Once you’re “beyond IRRs,” outcomes become narrative-managed.

This is the same move infrastructure builders make when they stop talking about rates and start talking about “national competitiveness.” The moment the metrics aren’t enough, the story takes over.

2) “In a world where average gets bid up by the market.”

This is a quiet but important claim. It suggests that market inflation of valuations is an external force—something that happens—rather than the result of coordinated capital behavior. It absolves the speaker from participating in the very dynamics he’s describing. “Average gets bid up” makes overcapitalization feel like weather, not choice.

That framing is not innocent. If the market is weather, nobody is responsible. If the market is weather, concentration is just adaptation. And if concentration is adaptation, then everything that follows can be described as discipline instead of domination.

3) “Founder’s favorite investor” / “we define it by trust.”

This one is subtle. “Trust” here is framed as proximity and asymmetry: founders tell him everything, he’s “months ahead of a board.” That’s presented as virtue. But structurally, it’s an argument against formal governance and for informal influence. It positions personal relationship as a substitute for oversight.

That same logic appears in data center siting: backroom utility deals framed as “efficient partnership” instead of public process. It’s not that governance is wrong. It’s that governance is slow—and slow threatens advantage.

4) “The war for AI dominance is now a sovereign-level concern.”

This phrase is doing escalation work. It moves decisions out of the realm of market choice or local consent and into geopolitical necessity. Once something is “sovereign-level,” opposition becomes suspect and speed becomes a virtue.

That framing is exactly what lets infrastructure override local objections: you’re not saying no to a project, you’re saying no to the nation. This is how “permission” gets manufactured without asking.

5) “Private-to-private value assimilation.”

This is a euphemism masquerading as analysis. What it really describes is capital recycling inside a closed loop, increasingly decoupled from public markets, public scrutiny, or public exit ramps.

When paired with the data center warning, it becomes revealing: capital wants to circulate among owners and operators, not landlords or publics. Infrastructure becomes internal plumbing for private ecosystems. The public is invited to pay for the grid, then excluded from the value chain built on top of it.

Implications

Now bring it back to the phrase that feels “a bit weird”:

“One of ones.”

“One of one” already means unique. “One of ones” tries to make uniqueness into a category. It sounds like rigor, but it’s actually a shield phrase: it turns power concentration into discernment, inevitability into taste, and exclusion into discipline.

This matters because it quietly justifies the very behavior the memo later warns about. If you believe a few winners are inevitable, then massive speculative buildout feels rational. You’re not gambling; you’re preparing for the “one of ones.” That mindset is how society ends up paying early for projects that later get described as “market corrections.”

Call to Recognition

This is the fault line: our essays keep reopening questions that this memo tries to settle.

Who decides?

Who pays?

Who carries the risk when inevitability turns out to be a bet?

Language like “one of ones” is designed to close those questions. It makes the outcome feel earned, and the costs feel unavoidable. But the costs are not unavoidable. They are assigned. And the assignment happens through contracts, commissions, permitting, incentives, and the soft coercion of “sovereign necessity.”

The memo is useful precisely because it is smooth. Smoothness is the tell. When phrases become too elegant, it’s usually because they are doing concealment work—turning choices into destiny.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d — My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload.

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