For the past year, my partner has used either ChatGPT or Claude to help him make almost every decision. Need help writing an email? Claude links to a tool that does it for him. Need help negotiating a lease renewal? He puts it through A.I. for an answer. He talks to ChatGPT daily and feels it knows him better than he knows himself. He has discussed our arguments with it to understand them better.
At one point he struggled to get out of a work rut and wanted to regain excitement or hope in a bad job situation. We had several discussions and I gave him advice from my experience. Days later he said, “I was talking to ChatGPT and it made so much sense!” Then he repeated the same advice I had given him. He is sometimes on his computer for hours on end, and not really spending the quality time with me that I deserve.
I respect using A.I. to save time figuring out how to roast a chicken or finding information you need. Still, one reason I love my partner is his sharp mind and critical thinking. Using A.I. for every decision is something I don’t understand. I believe in using all your resources before turning to technology. Do the research, use real resources and think of a solution yourself.
Here’s my question: How do I go about telling my partner his reliance on A.I. is damaging our relationship? ChatGPT and Claude are so embedded in his life that I’m not sure how to approach the situation. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist: There are lots of ways in which artificial intelligence, including the kind behind those chatbots, serves us well. (Bear in mind that A.I. is under the hood in all sorts of applications and features we don’t think of as A.I.: spam filters, route planning, credit card alerts, garden-variety internet search and on and on.) But it’s a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate. Socrates wasn’t wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention.
Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: Writing brought advantages, too. And there are plenty of skills we can lose without much regret (shoeing horses, folding road maps). But one thing we surely don’t want to lose is a basic capacity for critical thinking. That would be an example of “constitutive” de-skilling — the loss of a capacity, like judgment or empathy or imagination, that’s central to our moral or intellectual being. You fell for someone who thought for himself; it’s understandable that watching him outsource that mind to a machine could dim his appeal.
In “On Liberty” (1859), the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, about someone who has his own “plan of life,” that “he must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.” So one risk in downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won’t be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.
There’s another risk in what you describe. By letting his conversations with the bot supplant actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people. It sounds as if he may have lost sight of the fact that a large language model isn’t a person. You’ve reported an episode of what might be called “botsplaining”: hearing your own good advice repeated back to you with the authority of a machine. But it also suggests he values his time with the chatbots more than his time with you. It’s understandable that you’re feeling crowded out. Be direct with him about how you feel. What’s clear is that he’s brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it’s talking too much.
I sometimes wonder what amount of the population isn’t subscribed to that kind of thinking. And they rather like someone to tell them what’s right and what is wrong, what to do… I mean we see this in politics. Especially in recent times. We generally have something like that in how we like to consume content online, with algorithms, filter bubbles, doom scrolling etc. And we have it in AI chatbots. I’d say quite some people like the convenience of outsourcing(?) their brain. And we also have politics and certain internet dynamics take a toll on relationships.
It’s definitely a human flaw. That’s why cult leaders are successful. Just tell people what they want to hear until you get them hooked. Then once they’re hooked you can pivot to being abusive and exploiting followers.