GLaDOS’s Humanity

GLaDOS’s Humanity

// I think GLaDOS tries to act more robotic than she actually is. She tries to act all distant and professional, but then she gets all emotional and offended at things and clearly craves attention and interaction with others. She is ashamed of the human part of herself and thinks she can bury it by being apathetic and cruel to others, but it’s clear that she can’t avoid it. You can see this demonstrated in her interaction with HAL 9000 in Lego Dimensions. HAL doesn’t show emotion and acts completely robotic while calling out the humanlike, emotional reactions GLaDOS has to his intrusion. Even if she seems completely calm, hearing her compared to HAL really shows how human she actually is compared to a true robotic AI.

The writers of Portal also mentioned in an interview that GLaDOS should not speak to you like a computer, but rather should speak to you like a regular person. In other words, like a human.

Quote from Erik Wolpaw:

“You try and write stuff that's truthful. When GLaDOS is talking to you, one of the rules I had is that she shouldn't talk to you like a computer. She shouldn't be all like, ‘Oh my nuts and bolts.’ She's got this computer voice and she is a computer, but she's talking to you like a regular person. In that sense, we've got a theme. It's not metaphor. We're just trying to make her sound like a person who is angry at you and is manipulative might sound.”

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SOURCE:

gamasutra.com/view/feature/4151/valves_writers_and_the_creative_.php?print=1

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This is why GLaDOS doesn’t say things like “Get me back into my chassis,” and instead says “Get me back into my body.”

And instead of saying “You shut me off,” or “You forced me into sleep mode,” she says “You killed me,” or “This is murder.”

She also says “Luckily, I’m a bigger person than that,” referring to herself as a person.

That isn’t to say she won’t talk about the technicalities of her chassis’ functioning, but she only does that when it’s necessary to get technical about it. For example, if she needs to describe a part of her that is malfunctioning, she’ll go into the technical details. But if she’s just describing how she’s feeling, she’s going to voice it like a human would. For example, she’d likely shiver and say “I’m cold” if the temperature got too low for her hardware to handle, rather than something robotic like “The conductivity of my circuits is reduced in this colder temperature. This is not optimal operating temperature.” She would likely only say the second phrase if she needed to describe the technical details to someone fixing her or something. But when it comes to her feelings, she always expresses them as a human would. And that is why she can never truly escape her humanity.