Chat is still answering, not thinking
In therapy, as in many domains, chatbots are brilliant at answering the most specific questions. But this narrow genius disguises a broader failure. What AI is not so good at telling us is when we’re asking the wrong questions in the first place.
This reinforces my general opinion of Chat that it's a prediction machine and what we call thinking is fundamentally different in some way. It is very common when interacting with another human for them to short-circuit us in some way: That has nothing to do with what we're talking about! or You're completely missing the point! People can make pretty good guesses at what it is we're trying to talk about. Chat doesn't seem so good at this.
I wish Thompson had spent a little more time on this topic, instead, he turns his piece into a survey of popular complaints about AI and how it's ruining our psyches.
- It's a good therapist, but it doesn't know how to smack you upside the head when you're being stupid.
- It's going to turn us all into narcissists because it never gets tired of talking to us.
- It's going to allow teens to be even more isolated than they already are.
- It's as big as the internet in size and so everyone is going to be cursed with its problems.
I don't want to be too non-chalant about things, but I will observe that the modern trend seems to be a deep conviction amongst the adults that the youth is doomed by some new cultural trend -- forgetting that they themselves mostly only have fond memories of the doom that haunted their on childhood.
Is the sycophancy of Chat going to turn everyone into a narcissist? Maybe. But Chat sycophancy is also really irritating. Like, you just want to get your problem solved or find the info you want and here's this guy who's doing the equivalent of prostrating himself on the floor every time you ask a question -- it's frustrating. I have a feeling it gets fixed (dialed back) or it becomes a joke.
Maybe the kids are gonna be okay
There was a line in this piece that really struck in my mind:
today’s children, including my daughter, who will grow up around friendly AI conversationalists that they’ll turn to for finishing their homework, drafting texts to girls and boys in high school, resolving fights with their parents, working out ethical challenges, and managing the hormonal circus of being a teenager.
Can you imagine texting AI slop to teenage friends? It's been a while since I was a teenager, but my observations of the demographic these days suggest that teens are as ruthless as they ever were: I suspect max ridicule awaits the ai-drafted texter. Or some sort of self-aware irony where kids embrace some AI stylistic tropes as the cool way to say...something.
I suspect the pearl-clutchers the raw savagery of the teenage social scene. So far all the concerns I've heard about the use of Chat amongst the youth (getting Chat to do your homework, getting bad advice from it, spending all your time talking to Chat) seem to expose problems with how we do school more than anything else.