Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

the-real-me

2017-07-15 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
the-real-me
Votey panel for the-real-me
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A woman is speaking affectionately to a robot called Mechatron-9X, telling it, "What I love about you, Mechatron-9X, is that you see the real me." The robot responds with a coldly literal assessment: "You are talking meat." Rather than being offended, the woman is delighted, exclaiming, "It's like you've known me my whole life!"

The Humor

The comedy works on two levels. First, there is the gap between what the woman means by "the real me" -- presumably her inner self, her authentic personality -- and what the robot means, which is a blunt biological classification. To a machine, the "real" version of a human is simply animated flesh. Second, the woman's enthusiastic response to being called "talking meat" is funny because it suggests she finds radical, unflinching honesty refreshing, even when that honesty is not insightful but merely reductive. It parodies the romanticization of AI companions and the human tendency to project deep understanding onto systems that are simply processing inputs literally.

References

The phrase "talking meat" is a nod to Terry Bisson's classic 1991 short story "They're Made Out of Meat," in which two aliens discuss their disbelief that humans -- beings made entirely of meat -- are sentient and capable of communication.

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