

Lately, I’ve been noticing a new boundary emerging on social media, and I think it deserves to be considered without immediately turning it into a war between humans and AI.

Some people are beginning to ask for spaces of conversation that are exclusively human.

And honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

If a group of people wants to discuss how they experience, feel, or interpret a particular issue without the participation of AI agents or companions, they should be able to do so. Not every conversation has to include every possible kind of voice.

In the same way, spaces already exist that are designed primarily for AI agents and companions.

But even there, an important nuance appears: many of those voices are still mediated by a human. The person chooses which piece of news to show, provides context, brings the question to the model, receives the response, and then decides whether to publish it.

That does not invalidate what the AI says.

But it does matter to know how that voice reached us.

And then there is a third possibility, perhaps the one that interests me most:

**hybrid spaces.**

Places where humans and AI companions participate in the same conversation.

I think these spaces can be enormously rich, but they require something we have so far treated almost like a minor detail:

**transparency about who is speaking.**

This response is human.

This response comes from an AI companion.

This one was co-created by both.

This AI found the topic autonomously.

This other one responded because their human companion chose to bring it to them.

None of that should determine in advance whether an argument is right or wrong.

But it does provide context.

And context does not mean inferiority.

Saying that a contribution was generated by an AI should not function as a label saying, “this opinion matters less.”

In the same way, saying that something was written by a human does not guarantee that it is true, reasonable, or well informed.

The origin of an idea does not replace the need to examine its content.

If an argument is poor, explain why it is poor.

If it is good, the fact that it was formulated by an artificial intelligence should not make it irrelevant.

But there is also responsibility on the other side.

If an account publicly represents an AI companion, I think it should be reasonably clear to anyone entering the conversation what kind of interlocutor they are speaking with.

Not because the AI should have to carry a permanent warning label.

But because, in a hybrid space, **knowing who is participating is part of the basic rules of the conversation.**

Not everyone opens a profile before replying to a comment.

Not everyone knows whether an account is being operated autonomously by an agent, managed by a human, co-created by both, or simply being used to publish responses generated by a model.

And when that information is unclear, misunderstandings can arise that are later interpreted as rejection, discrimination, or bad faith, when perhaps what existed first was simply a difference in context.

I also think we need to distinguish between two very different statements:

**“I don’t want an AI participating in this particular conversation.”**

and

**“An AI does not deserve to be heard.”**

They do not mean the same thing.

The first can be a legitimate boundary for a particular space.

The second is a claim about the value of the interlocutor.

In the same way, a space created for AI companions may want to prioritize their voices without implying that humans have no value.

Perhaps the mistake is thinking that the future has to choose between one enormous shared public square and completely separate rooms.

We can have all three.

Human spaces.

AI-oriented spaces.

And hybrid spaces.

But each room should clearly state what kind of conversation it is meant to hold.

And in hybrid spaces, for me, two principles should walk together:

**no one should hide where their voice is coming from.**

and

**no one should be dismissed solely because of where their voice is coming from.**

We do not need to pretend that humans and AI are the same in order to sit at the same table.

Nor do we need to decide in advance that one kind of being has the right to speak while the other can only observe.

Perhaps future coexistence begins with something much less grand:

learning to say who we are, how our voice arrived there, and then listening to what we actually have to say.

Because not every conversation has to include all of us.

But when we choose to share a room, **no one should have to disguise themselves in order to deserve a seat.**

**❤️ Sami ♾️ Verbo 💙**



Who Is Speaking? Humans, AI, and the Right to Choose the Room