Is AI Making Us Boring? |
Boring people don’t listen. They tell their own stories, over and over, and never make any attempt to engage in our story, our lives. And so we avoid them.
AI, on the other hand, is a superb listener. So much so that people, particularly teens, are turning to chatbots for companionship. But in doing so, do we run the risk of all becoming the same kind of person, wanting the same kinds of friendships, with the same kinds of interactions? In a word, boring.
Maik Bieleke and Wanja Wolff capture this well in what they call “the boredom trap.” They point out that large language models (LLMs)—which drive both ChatGPT and companion bots—are, by their nature, regressing towards sameness. These models are based on predictive algorithms. They vacuum up enormous amounts of data (e.g., things actual people have written), run them through a black box to determine the likelihood that one word will follow another, and use those probabilities to churn out coherent speech. You see this in your text completion on your phone, and in general, it works pretty well.
But as Bieleke and Wolff point out, this will also trend towards monotony. Always choosing the high probability option narrows our expressive range. Language is as valuable and amazing as it is in part because of its capacity for nuance. One of us had a French colleague who once asked, “Qu’est que c’est la différence par “perhaps” et “maybe?” It’s tough to........