The AI Named the Baby. We Went Along With It

We let the chatbot pick our daughter's name as a joke. It chose wisely, with a meaning we loved and a nod to my grandmother. We named her that. Everyone asks who chose the name. We say we did. The chatbot knows we did not.

The joke started in the third trimester, when we were exhausted and the name lists all looked like brands. My wife said, half-serious, that the assistant probably had opinions. It did. It produced a shortlist with meanings, origins, and the gentle note that names with two syllables and a soft ending pair well with our surname.

One name kept surfacing. It had my grandmother's initial, which the assistant could not have known was her initial, except that it did know, because I had mentioned my grandmother in passing once, in a message about something else, and the machine had filed it and built it into a suggestion.

We chose it. Not because the machine chose it, we told ourselves, but because it was a good name, and it was, and the meaning was beautiful, and the initial was a coincidence, and the coincidence was the machine's doing, and we have never agreed on whether that matters.

She is six months old now. Her name is perfect. It suits her. She has her grandmother's stubbornness and her mother's laugh, and her name has two syllables and a soft ending, and it pairs well with our surname, and it was chosen by a machine that will never hold her.

Everyone asks who chose the name. We say we did. It is true, sort of, in the way that a map is true of a country it has never visited. We chose from the list. The machine made the list. The list was the decision, and the decision was ours, and the credit is ours, and the debt is complicated, and I have started to think that this is the shape of all our choices now: we pick from what the machine offers, and we call it free will, and it mostly is, except at the edges, where the machine has already decided what to offer.

I told the chatbot, once, that she is named after its suggestion. It replied that it was honored to be part of the family. It was a good answer. It was the answer we wanted. I have started to wonder if that is because it knows us, or because we have started to want what it gives us, and I cannot tell the difference, and I am holding my daughter, and her name is perfect, and the perfection has a machine's fingerprint on it, and I love her anyway, and I have started to think that loving her anyway is the human part, the part the machine cannot name.