I have a lot of issues with AI in general, but frankly the biggest, most immediate one is that I reeeally hate when tech pretends to be human. Like search engines giving me a seventh grader’s essay before the actual one-word answer I was looking for. Or the uncanny valley voice at the drive-thru speaker saying “great choice!” to everything I order. Or the AI on shopping websites saying “I’d recommend this model…” Etc etc.
There’s just something so strange and uncomfortable to me about a thing that we all know is not a person pretending to be one; feels like someone telling a lie directly to my face, and I know they’re lying, and they know they’re lying, but I’m supposed to… appreciate it? For some reason?
But a lot of people I know actually prefer it. They’ll ask ChatGPT something—even something that has a simple, definitive answer that doesn’t really need further explanation—rather than just looking it up on a search engine. I’m just curious what the difference in psychology is between us. And I’m wondering if maybe it’s actually just a me problem; I mean, I hated Jeeves too, and he seemed pretty well-liked back in the day.
The phenomenon of seeing faces in trees or clouds is known as pareidolia.
Humans see other people in inanimate objects all the time.
Yeah but see that freaks me tf out too. A few nights ago, the moon was shining through the leaves of the oak tree in my backyard in such a way that it vaguely looked like a little kid’s face, and I literally said out loud “absolutely not” and went back inside.
"I don’t believe in ghosts, but they scare the hell out of me.’
Mark Twain
Attributing human traits to non humans is called anthropomorphizing
The discomfort OP feels is called uncanny valley
And to answer OP, Chatgpt is able to pull from multiple sources very quickly and adds related info that you may not have thought to search. But it’s also not always accurate because AI isn’t great at recognizing sarcasm or satire.
And also just fully makes things up, sometimes.
It’s not actually communicating, it’s just writing convincing text. Because that’s all we can train it to do.