MyPhone Called Me a Liar

“You’re a liar.”

The words, like high beams out of nowhere, startle at first, send my heart racing, before settling into irritation once my body recognizes what my mind has already begun to understand: scam text.

I set down the phone. I look around as if the sender of the text were lurking behind the dogwood bush outside my window, straining to look in, to see my reaction. I look back down at the phone. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust it to decide — smartly — which messages to accept and which ones to reject. Before now, the occasional unsolicited “hello” that floated onto my lock screen seemed benign enough, cheery even. Like a little smile or a friendly wave from a stranger who passes you on the sidewalk. Of course, there’s a term for this type of scam: pig butchering. Just as pig farmers fatten up swine before sending them off to slaughter, scammers attempt to build trust with their targets, byte by byte, before swindling them.

But you’re a liar? What kind of relationship blossoms out of insult, other than, say, in elementary school, when “I hate you” was code for “I kind of like you but I don’t want my friends to know”?

I force myself to open the text and find the area code. I search online and discover 616 is Grand Rapids, Michigan. I don’t know anyone in Michigan. I haven’t even been to Michigan, except for Detroit, and only long enough to rent a car and drive it to Indiana. Maybe someone I wronged long ago had moved to Michigan and taken up a new number. Maybe my high school Latin teacher had decided that the time I tried to cheat on her pop quiz was worth taunting me over years later.

To lie — to prevaricate, to dissemble, to palter, to fib — is to be normal, statistically speaking anyway. Research shows that most people lie at least twice a day. Prolific liars, though, tell six or more lies daily. As a mom to a three-year-old, there’s no question which camp I fall into:

Mommy, can we get a kitten after school?

Maybe

Mommy, can unicorns fly?

Sometimes, depends on the weather

What about poop, can poop fly?

All the time, kiddo

Even though we are all, all of us, liars, most of us don’t want to be labeled a liar, especially by an SMS bot. As the children’s book Words and Your Heart reminds us, words are powerful. “Super super super super super super super super super super duper powerful,” my daughter says with (extra) emphasis, when we get to that page in the book. “Your words can actually change the way someone’s heart feels.”

Rules of decorum in rarified institutions like the House of Commons in the United Kingdom forbid the use of the term “liar” and other abusive language (To get around the rule, Winston Churchill famously deployed the term “terminological inexactitude” to throw shade on another member of parliament). In the United States, public figures seem to have lost patience with such civility. In 2009, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled out “you lie!” during a speech President Barack Obama delivered to Congress on the topic of health care reform. That outburst was followed a few months later by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words “that’s a lie” during Obama’s State of the Union address (the supreme court equivalent of a full-throated bellow). And the New York Times broke long-standing precedent when it called Donald Trump a liar for the first time in 2016.

Even the much beloved Taylor Swift couldn’t avoid the label when, in 2020, Kim Kardashian accused Swift of lying about the content of her phone call with Kanye West before he released his song “Famous” that includes an explicit lyric about Swift. Swift’s publicist then accused Kardashian of lying about lying (a splitting of hairs tit-for-tat that will make you want to pull all your hair out).

“Depending on the context, calling someone a liar could be defamatory, causing harm to a reputation. But, more often than not, calling someone a liar may be simply an expression of opinion,” writes Roy Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech.

What happens, though, when a bot calls you a liar? Is it expressing an opinion? And if so, does the First Amendment extend its privileges to AI? Writing for The Conversation, Simon McCarthy-Jones, an associate professor in clinical psychology and neuropsychology, says, “Giving AI free speech rights could actually harm our ability to think freely…It could control our attention, discourage pause for reflection, pervert our reasoning, and intimidate us into silence.”

In other words, this Michigan-based bot, in goading me into reconsidering my truthiness, is kicking up all manner of self-doubt, sending me down a rabbit hole of self-loathing and shame, where nothing but infinite ruminations of past deceptions ping pong around my head until…what? Until I share my bank account and routing numbers? It’s like some AI-rendered version of the liar’s paradox, in which a bot designed to commit fraud is in fact telling the truth when it calls me a liar.

It’s true that when I was five or six years old, I lied to my mom when she caught me with a piece of gum I had purloined from the grocery store after church one Sunday.

“Where did you get that?”

“From my pocket.”

“Who put it in your pocket?

“Jesus?”

“Jenny Rebecca!”

“Ok, fine, it was Satan. Definitely Satan did it.”

But stretching the truth is what kids do. They pull on it, aerate it, make it lighter and chewier, until it’s much more pleasing on the tongue, just like taffy. And anyway, it’s just one bot’s opinion. Do I really care what it thinks?

I decide to ask ChatGPT if I’m a liar.

“Whether or not someone is considered a liar depends on their actions and intentions,” it tells me. “If you’re concerned about being truthful and avoiding deception, it’s a commendable goal to work towards honesty and integrity in your words and actions.”

“Is Taylor Swift a liar?”

“I don’t have personal opinions or make judgments about individuals,” it says.

“What about you? Are you a liar?”

“I do not have the capacity for self-awareness or consciousness so I don’t possess intentions, beliefs, or the ability to lie or tell the truth.”

“But have you ever been to Michigan?”