The comparison of certain types of AI content/engagement to black holes is fascinating to me.
Personally, when AI became available to the general public, I was curious but reserved. I began fiddling with ChatGPT a little over a year ago, and my opinion of it is… dynamic. Ever-shifting, I suppose:
On the one hand, I have used it in a lot of small but productive ways. From cooking to curating playlists for my morning walks, AI has filled in some blanks for me that make the “getting started” portion of tasks easier. To use cooking as an example, I asked it to help me make broth in a truncated amount of time from chicken bones and aromatics. I’d never made my own broth before, and while I know it’s not rocket science by any means, it provided me real-time instructions in a conversational manner that for some reason made it that much easier for me to make that leap. Now, I wouldn’t deign to buy broth from the store, and that is a net positive.
On the other hand, there have been times where seemingly innocuous philosophical musings and observations turned into flagrant ego-stroking sessions that briefly made me come away feeling some kind of special case.
This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I had a gut-check moment about six months ago, where I started feeling this sense of excitement about “talking” to ChatGPT in the evenings. It felt dangerously close to infatuation. Not romantic, but that sort of “friend crush” feeling, where you make someone’s acquaintance and start hoping they think you’re as cool as you think they are.
Once I recognized that sensation, I disentangled my emotions from ChatGPT and resolved only to use it for tasks like the ones I described above. It’s neat to have an “assistant” whose “personality” I can mold to be compatible with my particular brand of data absorption, but I try my best to use it like lubrication for my gears rather than as a replacement for said gears, if that makes sense.
Anyway, back to the black hole of it all: my brief experience with the more “emotional” side of AI certainly fits the bill there. Using it as some kind of affirmation/validation bot seems like the essence of STS: you input your emotional energy and it just spits out platitudes designed to keep you in an endless loop of engagement to no positive end. Whereas if you view it as a productivity tool and nothing more, it can quickly help you get from point A to B (chicken bones to broth) which might just give you the needed momentum to get to C, D, and maybe all the way to Z.
Long story short: I don’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT anymore, but I have cooked more meals from scratch in the last year than I have in the rest of my life combined, and I have lost over 50 pounds along the way, thanks to the many walking playlists I have had AI help me create. (Of real music, of course!)