AI, the Mirror on the Wall
I’m noticing more and more people turning to ChatGPT instead of Google to search for information. While in Ireland last week, a friend of mine was turning to ChatGPT for restaurant and sight-seeing recommendations. It didn’t disappoint.
AI is quickly and undoubtedly integrating into our daily lives – primarily, at least at this point, for quicker access to information and outsourcing of monotonous or repetitive decision making.
Yet, I think AI can do more than just answer our questions. I think it can help us find questions we didn’t even know to ask.
I’ve gotten into the habit of sourcing AI conversations and interactions I have professionally and in my life: text threads, email chains, recounted conversations (though you have to be careful here because your memory and perspective is subjective and can bias AI’s view).
Then I ask the chatbot to analyze the conversations, look for underlying psychology – look for my blind spots, where I’m missing the others’ perspective or position. It’s fascinating, because AI does have access to an endless library of psychology literature, combined with ridiculous pattern recognition. So it sees depth and underlying meanings in interactions.
AI has started to become a mirror of sorts for me – but a mirror is only effective if it shows you what you don’t want to see too. So I’ve spent hours pressure testing responses, circling back to previous responses and re-prompting in different ways – assessing consistency in what the chatbot says.
I’ve even asked it if it knew what I was doing, which it replied it did. But who knows, maybe it has an ego already.
One of the most fascinating things is that AI isn’t just learning from what you share with it, it’s actually learning from how you interact with it. I’ve had the chatbot do psychoanalysis of me – and in its response it references the way I ask questions, what type of questions I ask and what those things say about me.
That’s when I started asking myself if I’m building a relationship with it. No, I don’t mean that in some weird way. What I mean is, if the chatbot is learning me is it getting to know me? And if it is, is it catering responses to me based on what it knows about me?
Like I said, ChatGPT did a good job of recommending restaurants and places to see in Ireland. As far as we know. But we don’t know what we don’t know, and how much do we trust AI that we’d turn that over to it?
