There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of a midday Sunday coffee at the end of a weekend away with friends. The richness of two days spent laughing, talking, thinking, imagining. Three pairs of hands wrapped around warm cafes con leche. Jackets we pull tight against the autumn air.
A question, a topic, a world of ideas to explore before we part ways.
What do you think of using ChatGPT for life advice? I know someone who’s going through a breakup and told me they talked with ChatGPT for five hours recently, and that they felt they really got to the core of understanding some of their issues.
I have opinions, says one friend.
Me too, lots.
And off we go into the vast possibility of deep, curious conversation between friends.
We talk about the risks of giving personal information to the tools. The cost of maintaining the data centers. The probability that soon there will be advertising based on what people are sharing in these seemingly private chats.
Imagine you are asking ChatGPT for advice because you’re fighting with your sister, and the AI suggests you should go visit her, says our most critical friend. Then you go to Kayak to look at tickets and the prices can be manipulated, because the tools now know how important it is for you to travel to the place where your sister lives.
Damn, I say. You’re so right. The targeting that’s possible when you’ve catalogued someone’s innermost thoughts is far beyond the cookies that currently sell us things based on our search history. Plus most of these tools are housed in the US, where profits matter far more than protecting people. (Just look up the Zuckerberg hearings around the negative impact of social media on teenage girls if you need an example.)
But it’s not all politics and dystopian futures.
We also get philosophical. How is AI impacting our sense of self? Can a generative AI really know anything at all? How is it possible that a tool built to model relationships between words—a tool that has no real knowledge of its own—is helping people understand themselves? And what does it mean for a human brain to know things, really?
Brain research tells us that different sides of the brain are responsible for different parts of who we are, I offer. I’ve been reading Conscious: A Brief Guide to The Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris and the research she shares about how the two sides of the brain work is completely fascinating. In the vast majority of people, Harris writes, the left hemisphere is responsible for the expression of language through speech and writing, leaving the right hemisphere mute; however, the right hemisphere is able to communicate through nodding and gestures of the left hand (and singing, in some cases.)
AI is trained on written knowledge; information collected and passed on and reproduced by left brain language. What about all the parts of human experience happening in the right brain? And what about the fact that we don’t even understand many ways of knowing including how our emotions and nervous system interact, let alone have them documented enough to be included in AI models?
We leave without answers—but with the rock-solid certainty that this conversation is better than any we might have with ChatGPT. That living in bodies that can drink coffee and hear the crunch of autumn leaves under our feet as we hug each other goodbye is essential to being human.
Hello 👋🏻 I’m Willow, and I’m currently writing here as part of Fika’s 4-week inaugural Challenge. I like their vision of building a new kind of place online to read and write with real humans. All photos are my own unless otherwise noted.