I finally feel grateful for AI, and it’s weirding me out

In case you weren’t paying attention, the world celebrated AI Appreciation Day last week on July 16. Or, in my case, didn’t celebrate it. It seemed like a pretty silly excuse for a holiday, especially after I failed to mark National Electricity Day—the 272nd anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s fabled kite-flying experiment—the previous month.

But a few days after AI Appreciation Day came and went, I got to thinking. For all the ways generative AI feels like astounding technology that’s still in search of real-world problems it’s consistently capable of solving, I’ve finally found a personal use-case scenario for OpenAI’s ChatGPT that leaves me giddy. I’ve even impulsively thanked the chatbot several times for its assistance.

I wasn’t asking ChatGPT to write stuff for me (I prefer to do that on my own) or as an alternative to Google for general research (it’s less prone to hallucinating than in the past, but I’d still give many of its answers a C-). Instead, I’ve been relying on it to help me update a website I originally put together using the WordPress publishing platform over a decade ago.

I know just enough about the nuts and bolts of WordPress—PHP and CSS code—to be dangerous, which means I often can’t quite figure out how to do something, or need help spotting my own newly introduced bugs. In the past, I’d Google around for answers and usually end up at a WordPress tutorial site or a message board such as Stack Overflow. Now I just share my code with ChatGPT-4o, explain what I’m trying to accomplish, and seek its guidance.

It’s been a deeply rewarding experience. ChatGPT patiently and deftly explains the right way to achieve what I’m trying to do, deals well with follow-up queries, and, when its advice doesn’t work on the first try, usually nails it on its second attempt. That’s a far more efficient way to make progress than relying on generic instructions that might or might not apply to my particular issue.

You may have noticed that I described ChatGPT as “patient” and “deft” in the previous paragraph, thereby attributing human traits to software. Well, that’s what it feels like. It’s the closest I’ve come to forgetting that all I’m dealing with is an algorithm that’s stringing sequences of words together based on a lot of fancy math. And that’s weirding me out.

I’m not saying that forming an emotional bond with a product is new or strange. Plenty of people have long had one with their automobiles, leading to the not-at-all-unusual phenomenon of bestowing cars with human names. (My wife calls her Corvette “Corey” and my Ford Focus “Francesca.”) In the 1980s, Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle not only named his PCs but often referred to one of them, Zeke II, as a friend who happened to be a CompuPro Z80—a level of affection that made sense to me at the time even though I don’t think of my MacBook or iPad Pro anywhere near as fondly today.

But when I find myself anthropomorphizing AI, I get nervous. In part, that’s because I prefer to stay keenly aware that products such as ChatGPT are merely clever technology, not anything capable of the sort of sentience that would appreciate being appreciated.

Back in 2018, Mike Elgan wrote a wonderful opinion piece for Fast Company arguing that expecting kids to be polite to Amazon’s Alexa and other voice assistants might confuse them about the value of being polite to their fellow humans and degrade their ability to approach AI with the proper skepticism. I agree, and worry just as much about the negative side effects of grown-ups—myself included—showing respect to AI.

It’s not just that, though. Normally, any gratitude you feel toward a technology product really belongs to the people who made it. With generative AI, however, thanking everyone at OpenAI and the computer scientists elsewhere whose research made ChatGPT possible is insufficient.

Ultimately, everything the GPT-4o large language model knows about WordPress reflects the reconstituted, remixed knowledge of human beings whose writings on the subject got fed into the LLM for training purposes. I have no idea who these people are: OpenAI doesn’t disclose any details of its training set, nor do any of the answers I’ve received include citations. It’s possible that some of these WordPress gurus wouldn’t even want their knowledge to be AI fodder.

To use an admittedly stale allusion, wanting to thank ChatGPT for its simulated expertise feels like being grateful to the author of a CliffsNotes summary of Hamlet on the grounds that it’s a great story—without even knowing who Shakespeare was. Except in the case of AI, the summary draws on text written by millions of anonymous people. I’m sorry I don’t know who they are, because I benefit from their work every time I pop open a ChatGPT window.

ChatGPT and other forms of AI are only going to get more eerily humanlike: OpenAI’s model, after all, is Her. So I expect my feelings about them to grow more fraught. Maybe I’ll add annual reminders for AI Appreciation Day to my calendar—not as an excuse to throw a party, but as a day of quiet contemplation about the state of artificial intelligence and my relationship with it.

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