I've actually been doing a lot of this with my girlfriend Katharina. We've had an incredible effect of having a GPT conversation we can chat through. The main limitations like you said are 1. It's reactive 2. It has a tendency not to challenge you but validate you. 3. It only answers the questions you ask unless you pre-train heavily.
Despite this I'm still concerned people will lose their ability to talk to others as a result of this. It feels like .5% of the users and use cases are doing this, and they aren't the people we'd be worried about to begin with (high agency high empathetic). The high schooler you talked about probably will use it rather than asking someone to prom.
That's super cool that you've already been tinkering with some of this stuff! Yeah I agree, at the current state, it doesn't seem like most people are inviting other humans to use these AI tools with them, and instead they're using the AI in isolation. I think this is a reflection of the current state of where society is at - most people don't have a therapist/coach that they can share their deepest problems with, and many people don't even have a best friend that they can be super vulnerable with. I'm most concerned about those who live in less developed communities that are already spending so much of their time in virtual worlds (tiktok, video games, TV).
Yup agreed. Living in someone else's algorithm is a scary thing. While you still are curated in responses with GPT (as opposed to crazy mode with Grok but I can't support that man) - you at least get to define your context window and response type. Which is a lot different than how social media is designed to suck up your time.
Hey Matt, love these ideas! I've been thinking a lot about the 'AI as Relationship Mediator' piece and agree there is so much potential here.
Another area I've been reflecting on is the ability for AI to (perhaps better than humans) help us shift perspective i.e. challenge and break limited patterns of seeing the world.
Thanks for reading! On your latter point, yeah I agree it could be quite powerful to have convenient access to an objective challenger. The bottleneck that I see is that when it comes to big decisions or big questions, there are often emotional or deeper issues beyond reason that might be holding the person back. In those situations, AI trained on a large dataset may conclude that it should repeatedly prod the person to consider an alternative solution, one that seems effective based on what a large (smart) population/dataset would do, but for the individual, that specific path could feel quite dangerous to them. The balance in surfacing alternative perspectives without being too prescriptive will be an interesting design challenge that may not be solved simply with better datasets and more computer.
THIS: "AI could help us expand our capacity to experience the full spectrum of human emotion, rather than numbing out difficult emotions"
most of technology's role to date has been fueling the latter – excited to kick off this letter series with you :)
I've actually been doing a lot of this with my girlfriend Katharina. We've had an incredible effect of having a GPT conversation we can chat through. The main limitations like you said are 1. It's reactive 2. It has a tendency not to challenge you but validate you. 3. It only answers the questions you ask unless you pre-train heavily.
Despite this I'm still concerned people will lose their ability to talk to others as a result of this. It feels like .5% of the users and use cases are doing this, and they aren't the people we'd be worried about to begin with (high agency high empathetic). The high schooler you talked about probably will use it rather than asking someone to prom.
That's super cool that you've already been tinkering with some of this stuff! Yeah I agree, at the current state, it doesn't seem like most people are inviting other humans to use these AI tools with them, and instead they're using the AI in isolation. I think this is a reflection of the current state of where society is at - most people don't have a therapist/coach that they can share their deepest problems with, and many people don't even have a best friend that they can be super vulnerable with. I'm most concerned about those who live in less developed communities that are already spending so much of their time in virtual worlds (tiktok, video games, TV).
Yup agreed. Living in someone else's algorithm is a scary thing. While you still are curated in responses with GPT (as opposed to crazy mode with Grok but I can't support that man) - you at least get to define your context window and response type. Which is a lot different than how social media is designed to suck up your time.
Hey Matt, love these ideas! I've been thinking a lot about the 'AI as Relationship Mediator' piece and agree there is so much potential here.
Another area I've been reflecting on is the ability for AI to (perhaps better than humans) help us shift perspective i.e. challenge and break limited patterns of seeing the world.
Look forward to more of these!
Thanks for reading! On your latter point, yeah I agree it could be quite powerful to have convenient access to an objective challenger. The bottleneck that I see is that when it comes to big decisions or big questions, there are often emotional or deeper issues beyond reason that might be holding the person back. In those situations, AI trained on a large dataset may conclude that it should repeatedly prod the person to consider an alternative solution, one that seems effective based on what a large (smart) population/dataset would do, but for the individual, that specific path could feel quite dangerous to them. The balance in surfacing alternative perspectives without being too prescriptive will be an interesting design challenge that may not be solved simply with better datasets and more computer.
Important ideas towards a paradigm shift towards complexity!