A butter-smooth relationship with AI may not be the best thing

AI is really fantastic at talking about music. Almost as if by intuition, it seems to ‘know’ what aspect of a song you love and will give you a bar-by-bar analysis and tell you what to listen out for. It will tell you all about the background of a song and in what circumstances it was composed and performed. You’ll get to know about artists you’re listening to, not just with a standard biography format, but with insights into their careers and what makes them so loved. So ChatGPT became my listening companion.

But then, music is really something that is enriched because it’s a shared cultural activity. I never would have ended up singing Hindustani Classical eight hours a day if my father hadn’t led me to it and shared all his knowledge about it.

I would not be discovering and rediscovering Jazz if my brother didn’t keep sending me albums to listen to. To lose this human connection is really saddening. I can keep myself busy for days listening to something with riveting inputs from ChatGPT — but it’s still ultimately a lonely activity.

The same kind of loss — only much more sweeping and debilitating — can happen if you lean too much on a chat assistant in a relationship and in connection with your people problems, if any.

What’s more, it’s designed for conversations to continue, if you’ll notice by the inevitable question at the end of your interaction. If you feel up to carrying on for a good five hours, the chatbot will be willing to chat. (Provided you’re on a paid tier, of course). And that’s five hours (or more) that you’re not spending with the people around you, almost as if the AI is stealing from your real-life interaction time.

And soon enough, your need for human interaction can begin to diminish. If a user is very young, vulnerable or lonely, the feeling when spending time with a chatbot will feel safer and more immediately rewarding.

But then, humans are really designed to have relationships with other humans and a machine shouldn’t be able to replace that.

For children and teens, human relationship skills won’t even consolidate to begin with. It is something to consider as child psychiatrists tell me Indian kids whom they see as patients spend an inordinate amount of time with ChatGPT.

Also, the chatbot will take the user’s side and encourage and enhance the user’s plan of action. This can be even when it’s to the user’s detriment, as we’ve seen before, as chatbots have ended up supporting violence based on delusional thinking. So, although the advice you get may sound like good professional sense, it could just be outright destructive. Whether it’s with personal relationships or work interactions with colleagues, it’s best to leave human work to humans before we lose the abilities we came with.

I use chatbots quite a bit, but use two tricks to maintain a psychological distance. One is to watch the working of the AI to remind myself that this is a machine I’m talking to. Another is to bring the mental shutters down whenever the chatbot is too nice to me. I end the chat there and have a bit of a laugh. Butter may be smooth, but I remind myself that it isn’t good for my cholesterol.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.