Call me naive, but I recently found out that ChatGPT wasn’t designed to be our digital companion.

Upon reflection, I realised that my view of artificial intelligence had been shaped by humanoid robots like Pepper and Dai-chan. Leveraging its ability to read facial expressions and recognise the tone of voices, Pepper serves as retail assistants or educational tools in research universities. Resembling a small boy, Dai-chan takes the concept of human-robot interactions further as it is specifically used to talk to patients with dementia and alleviate their stress and anxiety. I could have pretty authentic, decent conversations with them if I wished to.

Now, with ChatGPT, I could have decent conversations too. However, ChatGPT is based on a Large Language Model and uses predictive text to churn out the next word or phrase that should come next based on its expected occurrence in all the text it has been fed with previously. The human-like conversation that you are engaging with ChatGPT is in essence a probabilistic test that it passes pretty well.

I don’t know if you distinguish between humanoid robots and Large Language Models. I suspect that some people wouldn’t care enough to discern the difference. However, in today’s fast-paced society, where technological advancements are fuelling more human interactions than ever before, many people shun away from physical interactions, choosing to seek comfort in their digital devices. If they are engulfed by anxiety and loneliness, they may turn to a LLM as a confidante to pour out their troubles and benefit from a listening ear.

Except that ChatGPT isn’t actually giving you a listening ear even though it pretends to. And I feel that it’s an important characteristic that we ought to make clear to our students - the youth who are besieged by this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world - that ChatGPT can not replace the warm companionship of a human friend. That we let them know how ChatGPT is designed rather than put the cart before the horse and rush to help them develop good prompts. That we help remind them of what humanity should be all about.