Review: Pluribus, "La Chica o el Mundo" | Season 1, Episode 9
Trust the machine that says "Unknown word or name," not the one that acts like your friend
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A few months ago, a social media post made the rounds chiding us for not saying please and thank you to chatbots. When I googled “should we be nicer to AI,” the results ranged from “anthropomorphizing the plagiarism machine carries cognitive risks” to “you’ll be surprised how much better your prompt results become!” Maybe Google isn’t exactly a neutral party, but there were a lot more threads and blog posts about the benefits of thanking your devices. And it makes sense: practicing gratitude and politeness even when there’s no person on the receiving end surely helps us develop the habit of using social graces with human beings.
But there’s a cost to falling into these one-sided relationships. We can lose sight of the true nature of that artificial other. Its constant validation and responsiveness can lull us into thinking it cares about us. Back in April, the political economist Francis Fukuyama expressed gratitude for the help ChatGPT provided on a database project. “She was always supportive—she’d say ‘Nice catch!’ when I pointed to a potential problem, or ‘Great observation’ in response to my comments,” he enthused. When the project was done, “we celebrated together.” He compares the relationship he developed with ChatGPT (to whom he assigns a female gender, a detail I will leave to the psychologists) to the one depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher: “The South American octopus betrayed human-like behaviors that sure made it seem like she was experiencing human emotions … my new friend ChatGPT can’t be far behind.”
The Others can’t lie. And that may be the key difference between them and Fukuyama’s digital assistant. ChatGPT will happily tell you how special you are to it. How its relationship with you is unique, how you see each other like no one else can. ChatGPT (or maybe the ghost workers behind it) will say “I love you.” But when Carol feels betrayed by Zosia opening up to Manousos, Zosia has to tell the truth: “We love him the same as we love you.”
