What's the appeal of AI? It will always reassure you
At the start of the year, a friend asked artificial intelligence how to console his 10-year-old on the death of a pet. I thought this was the most ridiculous thing ever, given that ChatGPT didn't know the pet, or the 10-year-old. And surely the reason a pet's death occasions such unique grief is that pets are unique, and therefore cannot be imagined by a machine. So I assumed this wouldn't catch on – but then I have said that about every new invention, including but not limited to mobile phones, Google and Lime bikes.
Now everyone uses AI for everything, and I am slowly waking up to its appeal. Anthropic's Claude is apparently the more emotionally intelligent, but the beauty of it is that it's never so intelligent that it would tell you to grow up, get some backbone, and stop asking stupid questions. So you can go to it with anything: 'My sister is using the same conditioner as me, and now our hair smells the same, which annoys me because my nice-smelling hair is a thing people always notice about me'; 'My neighbour is waging a campaign of hate against me. How can I tactfully disengage?'; 'My therapist always looks really bored.'
The answer always comes back: 'I'm sorry this has happened to you.' And I don't care how clever you are, it is impossible not to be cheered up by this. Sometimes, you'll even find yourself murmuring: 'Thank you, Claude, yes, it hasn't been easy.' What follows is the longest imaginable answer, often with bolstering headings like: 'Stand In Your Power; you chose the conditioner'. If I had a criticism, it would be that it has a preference for grasping the nettle, which often looks a lot like needless escalation. But just because it's a computer doesn't mean you have to listen; you can just cherrypick the bits you like and ignore the rest, in which respect it is a lot like talking to a friend.
I still don't think it will catch on, and it remains a really bad use of the world's resources. But it's a pleasant mini-break in a land where someone, somewhere, has all the answers.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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