catharine I’m pretty sure we’ll look back on the before and after of ai/chat gpt becoming a thing the way we look back on the before and after of the iPad. If you were around then, do you remember the wildness of thinking what it could do? That we were no longer limited to buttons, and that though glitchy, people would eventually make apps in a limitless way? I remember feeling utterly terrified. I was not a fan. I thought it was going to hurt people. In the end it seems to have both helped and hurt, as do most things that are part of human evolution- including the evolving of our tools. It’s made us so much more efficient.
I’m terrifed by what Chat GPT can do. I admit to talking to it sometimes just to see what it says, like, it scratches the Star Trek itch of wanting to say, “Hello, computer!” I know we’re all scared of what it will do, and that’s warranted. And of course there are very bad environmental aspects; hopefully that will eventually shift.
What I’m most scared of, I think, when it comes to ai, is what it might do to people psychologically. I’m scared that people who need relationships will skip relationships and go to the computer instead of relationships, because of the ease, because of the positive feedback loop and echo chamber it provides, because of the lack of need for work or investment. That scares me. I’ve sometimes jumped on people, thinking, maybe it’s good if people who only want to use someone sexually, for example, to get sex dolls and use ai chatbots; that maybe it’s better “for the rest of us,” but that’s actually pretty judgmental, and everyone wants relationship, even the people who you might think of being tempted by something like that. Everyone does. So it’s actually the weakest people- people with mental health conditions, and people who are lonely, who are most at risk of- in a way- being victimized by ai.
I’m scared of how it will influence children with developing brains, to have toys that talk. I’m scared of how it will influence the elderly who don’t have anyone left, and benefit from the little dopamine hit of a bot conversationalist. I’m scared because I think it’s something that all of us can and will fall prey to at some point- that at some point when we need a person, we’ll use a machine.
I like chat gpt for doing starting-point research on super niche topics; obviously a lot of results will be hogwash but it often helps find the needle in the haystack faster than other tools. It’s fun, on occasion, just to play to see what it does; it’s like a new toy.
It does scare me, though. I’ll never use it as part of my voice; never have. I could not ever.
I had it used in something I received that was one of the most painful documents I’ve ever read. It made it even worse than it otherwise would have been.
