ChatGPT....

Using AI to connect?

I have in the past week been invited to sessions on how ChatGPT is literally the most amazing thing to have been developed for humanity since sliced bread.

I generally do not get onto hype bandwagons, in fact my negative bias basically gives me a red alert of ‘danger, danger, class A BS dead ahead!’ when hype heads my way.

I was (nevertheless) intrigued when I was invited to see how ChatGPT could connect me with more humans than any content I could produce. How easy it was to produce months of content through an AI algorythmic programme. How this would bring in (presumably) income beyond my widest dreams.

What is the price to all of this?

Now when I look at cost benefit analysis, I suppose it is entirely different to usual models.

I have (over the years) realised that my brain just does not work like the brains of others, which has led to at times an isolated positioning in life. My main driver in life has never been to capitalise on human pain but to focus on creating a better. more fulfilling purposeful existence. I have striven to connect with those who are interested in creating better, and often have worked with, researched and developed programmes for people who are the most disenfranchised, marginalised and excluded of society.

I am not adverse to AI, in fact am working with a team just now, to develop an absolutely fabulous app that brings all you need to create a better life in one place, which has machine learning and AI very much integral to creating a more personalised, intuitive experience.

But.

Would I want AI to replace my words, my voice, my brain, my thoughts when I am reaching out to others.

It is a huge resounding,

NO

from me.

This is not just a brain NO but a massive physiological NO.

We live already in a world that is governed by alogorhythms, bots and computer says no philosophy.

We also live in a world that has record breaking un-wellness, mental health pandemics, epidemics and social disconnection.

Think about that.

Would you want a machine leading you down the rabbit hole of despair? As that is the pattern that it is recognising and responding to?

Would you want another machine reaching out to you and ‘selling you’ the solution to that pain?

I (as ever) did not want to just put my own opinion on this so I investigated to see if any research had been done on whether human beings intuitively responded to content, marketing or advertising that had been designed and created by AI and I am extremely excited to say that there has been.

The results are in.

The abstract says this -

The authors conduct two studies to examine artificial intelligence (AI) in creative programmatic contexts. Findings indicate that consumers have equally favorable attitudes toward human-created and Al-created cognitive-oriented advertising, but form lower evaluations of Al-created emotion-oriented creative content. Programmatic creative ads are effective for rational appeals and utilitarian products, but are ineffective for emotional appeals and hedonic products. The studies indicate that human rather than AI input is needed for creating emotion-oriented advertisements. (Bakpayev, M., Baek, T. H., van Esch, P., & Yoon, S. (2022). Programmatic creative: AI can think but it cannot feel. Australasian Marketing Journal, 30(1), 90-95.)

What does this mean?

That in order to connect on a human level we recognise when human beings are not creating that connection.

The emotional world of the majority of human beings is not healthy right now. I do not see enough emotional regulation and the ability to be able to utilise our emotional system in the best of ways. As unhealthy as it is, it still smells the coffee when that emotional connection is not human.

This is gives me great optimism for the future.

All is not lost. (Yet).

People are not bothered if they know whether content is AI or humanly created. However, they do not respond to the emotional appeal of AI (Yet.)

Who knows how long this will last into the future, particularly for those amongst us who have not had sincere, honest, emotional interactions with others.

For now though, it gives me comfort that ChatGPT will not be able to replace the sincerity and intention of my content. This AI will not be able to reach out to you like I can and give your limbic system a hug, support and respite from the toxicity of life like I can. Your prefrontal cortex will not be fooled by ChatGPT into thinking that it has all the answers.

This is truly something to celebrate.

You have to wonder though at the laziness of someone who wants to outsource connecting with their audience to a machine.

I started this writing in order to connect more with people. The right people. The people who are genuinely wanting things to be better (and kinder). I will never ask AI to connect for me.

It is not humane. Literally.

We should be using AI to come up with the solutions that blight humanity, such as how can we stop the massive wealth transfer that has been occuring since the beginning of the 20th centure? How can we improve equity for all? How can we use communication for good and not for fear?

Instead we are using AI to see how much money we can persuade people to give us, how much content can be written and (if headlines are to be believed), using it to complete our university studies. This for me is staggering, why would we want a machine to write our essays? Surely we are there because we have a passion and a curiousity for what the subject is? Maybe then the AI should be used to find out why students are not feeling capable of writing their own reports?

So, I will not be learning how to utilise ChatGPT to reach out to you guys, or to anyone else. You will just have my musings, my thoughts and my processes.

For better or for worse.

I am all about improving humanity, not destroying it.

Human beings have an authentic intelligence that AI can never have. We should celebrate that.

Let us offload lower level tasks to the AI that then can free us up for more complex, critical, important work.

We need to completely rethink our approach and utility of this technology.

Connecting with humans is not low level tasking. It is highly complex, utterly humane and in need of authenticity that AI cannot deliver.

Connecting with humans is life and death, it is joy and fear, it is love and apathy. All depending on how it is done.

Connect with each other. Have conversations. Have interactions. Do not offload any of that to AI.

It is important to your brain function and structure that you do not do this.

Think about how human you can be and what that needs to look like, feel like, sound like.

It is extremely important.

I will not be partaking in any learning of how to use ChatGPT to connect with humans. I will learn through my interactions with you and how you respond.

You may not have noticed, I am not all about the fear and pushing your pain points to get rich quick.

I am all about giving you the tools so you can create whatever better life you want.

That to me is connection. It is the truest form of connection. It is sincere and full of integrity. Do not fall for insincere or artificial imitations.

“A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right.”