Opinion

Is it the tech companies? Or is it us?

Podcast episode

Amanda Ripley: I know the first time I used ChatGPT, my brain just kept thinking of it as a human. So I kept saying “please” and “thank you,” for example. Have you ever caught your brain treating AI like it’s human?

Josh Tyrangiel: I started very polite. You’re trained in society to be nice to things. And now that I’ve been using it for a year-plus, I’m like: “Just do it. Just do the thing, spit it back out!” And then if it’s too long, I’m like, “Too long!” So we’ve definitely gotten into a productive but very dysfunctional relationship.

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Amanda: So when it started out, there was kind of a honeymoon period. And now it’s like you’ve been married for 20 years, and you’re just barking orders.

Josh: Yeah. It totally started out like a Jane Austen novel where everyone is excessively polite. And now it’s very much like Edith and Archie Bunker — like an ancient relationship of screaming between the kitchen and the dining room.

Bina Venkataraman: This is really about human nature. The way that we interact with these chatbots is related to how we do things and how we’ve been doing them for time eternal. We anthropomorphize animals. We put our own lens on what human consciousness, and human cognition and intelligence, are........

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