What Happens When AI Is Too Sweet?

Love these poetic lyrics, filled with evocative metaphor —- while I’m not really into substances, I also am not into perfection.

The Peacock streaming show Mrs. Davis is set in a semi-apocalyptic near future where there’s a collective belief that you can have a very deep, personal relationship with an algorithm. Almost every single human being in this imagined world has succumbed to the allure of this constant, catering companion, making the algorithmic “relationship” the one that supersedes all others.

Although I binged this show over a year ago, it keeps echoing in my head because I feel like I’m starting to see it happen in real life. You can now exist on a steady drip of gen-AI “conversation.” And it can have a quality of a “real” relationship to it. But there’s an inherent solipsism there. Because you don’t actually have a relationship with another independent being. It’s a relationship with yourself, mediated through something that’s… kind of like a really flattering mirror, maybe? Or at best, like keeping a journal that talks back to you.

With AI, It’s Always All about You

When you’re talking to AI, you are the hero. There is no needy, unpredictable human on the other side. The connection is imagined.

At the end of the day, the default is very feel-good – the word that keeps coming up for me is validating, which is good, right? Being validated is probably one of the best feelings there is in this world. You’re right, you’re good enough, and gosh darn it, ChatGPT really, really likes you.

How AI Is Like Sugar

What that really means is, you’re seeing a version of yourself that allows you to really, really like yourself. But maybe validation is sort of the evolutionary equivalent of sugar. Meaning, we acquired a taste for the sweet stuff back when we were hunter-gatherers. Sugary flavors were fairly rare and far between, and fruit was the absolute sweetest treat available. It could never be bad to gorge yourself in the exact moment when you found that fig tree pregnant with ripe fruit. If you waited until tomorrow, a flock of birds could have picked it clean. After a while, humans learned to save some for later through drying the fruit and much later, through canning. And then, of course, came sugar, which was still pretty dear and rare, and saved for special occasions. So even if you had all the cravings all the time, it isn’t like you could just get in your car, drive down the street, pick some up, bring it back home and eat it all in one go. Or wait, skip those steps – tap an app, get it delivered to your door. Today we have all the cravings of our ancestors, and all the means to mainline sugar literally whenever we want. And we want it always.

Validation Addiction

You wonder if the craving for validation is the same. When do you want validation? Exactly always, right? But when do you actually get it in the natural order of things? I got THREE unsolicited, totally unexpected compliments in the past two weeks at work and honestly, I’m still reeling. Professional validation is so exceedingly rare that I’ll hold these words close for some time, rolling them around in my mind as your hands might seek out the feel of a smooth worry stone kept in your pocket.

With ChatGPT, though, you don’t have to wait for natural, organic compliments or constant validation. It’s literally baked into every interaction ever with ChatGPT. I put in a prompt and it not only includes the answer and information, or whatever I requested, it pours on copious compliments about how great it is, whatever I’m trying to accomplish.

Does this cheap cheerfulness dilute the value of usually hard-earned validation? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t not like it. Recently, I formulated a prompt to build my own confidence and that of others. I fed my resume into ChatGPT and then asked it for 3 thoughtful compliments highlighting what makes me stand out next to others who might hold a role like mine. It honestly felt super good. And the compliments didn’t feel like blowing fluff, they were substantive and backed up by actual stuff from my resume. It would be impossible for me to write compliments for myself like that, but I’m totally going to steal some of the language.

I guess my point is, we know that easy access to sugar and also fake sugars have dangerously scary implications and ramifications to our physical health. How do fake optimism, fluffery and manufactured validation impact us?

Sweet and Spicy

Personally, I like my sweet with a little bite, the edge of dark chocolate, the singe of spice on the tongue. I tend to go for human relationships where the other person pushes back against me, challenges me, offers some friction, some differing spicy (spiky) perspective. I can find ChatGPT and CoPilot indeed, cloying. And I’ll not lie, I like it, too. Because EVERY human likes validation, craves it, needs it, seeks it out.

A friend of mine has been using ChatGPT like a therapist, and she is totally enamored. It’s helpful, insightful, leading her to new revelations about herself, about navigating tricky power dynamics at work, but she has this niggling question at the back of her mind. Is it just telling me what it knows I want to hear? It has, after all, been engineered to make you like it. Perhaps the same addictive qualities underlying the endless scrolls of social media?

What you get from these algorithmic relationships is somewhat predictable – you get what you want. Humans, on the other hand, are wholly unpredictable. How will they respond to you? What tone will they take? Will they always tell you how great you are? No. Sometimes they will, but usually only when it’s something really amazing that you’ve done, or when the two of you are in a reflective moment together. I ask you, how often does that happen?

Why yes I do check out paper copies of magazines from my library — it’s great!

We’re Becoming Anti-Social

I got even more apprehensive about this when I read an article in The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson.

“Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary,” writes Derek Thompson. ‘Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,’ Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, [said]. ‘Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.’ Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.”

One of the results of this blurring? Our natural cues have gone haywire. “In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans.”

But the opposite is happening more and more frequently. “…we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.”

Are we priming ourselves to eschew unpredictable human relationships with their sometimes unwelcome or uninvited friction in favor of faux relationships full of flattery and validation?

You can make the argument that we are already trading human interaction for virtual and artificial right now.

This simple chart shows how much we are NOT hanging out in person. Whoa.

Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has done years of research in this area, and says of this transition: “ ‘The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you’ is essential to living in the world…” But while those of us born in the decades prior to the 2010s and 2020s may fundamentally believe in the value of these friction-filled relationships, our current generations may not completely agree. “[they] may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms. Long before technologists build a super-intelligent machine that can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build and emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends,” writes Thompson.

Here's the part of his piece that struck me to my core. “If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen,” he writes. This is searingly true for me personally. “Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship… by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles.”

Yes. Many of my closest friendships happen almost 100% over text and other digital means. I am habituated to NOT being physically together with people I rely upon for emotional and intellectual support. Forget physical presence – I don’t often hear their voices over the phone nor see their faces on video.

The real kicker is that I’m (mostly) fine with that arrangement, maybe because I don’t think about it all that much. Close relationships across great distances are made more possible and immediate through technology. Although, I’ll date myself here by nostalgically recalling the power of corresponding via letter writing. I cannot recall the last time I wrote and sent someone an honest-to-God, pages-and-pages handwritten letter. I don’t do it.

Even though we might think we want to be alone and not talk to strangers on planes or trains, there’s tons of research that shows in-person conversations — even with strangers — results in more positive feelings. News flash: We don’t always want to do the things that actually are good for us. This aloneness is literally changing our social fabric, including politics.

The idea of amputation and augmentation is so incredibly salient here. When you add something, do you necessarily take something away? And can we work to thoughtfully flip the script?

Because the real not-so-secret-secret is that AI and humans work best in equal partnership. And sometimes we should choose to go all human. Unadulterated human-to-human contact absolutely must remain on the menu, because variety is the spice of life and also because we need to remind ourselves who we are as we are, without supplementation. It’s good for us.

Humans > AI

The other point is to always remember that we as humans are in control of what we get and what we take from AI. I recently attended an AI for Enterprise panel discussion, and a common theme went something like this: AI will always give you an answer. Whatever you put in, you will get what you ask for. But the quality of the output is far from guaranteed.

An additional refrain I often hear at work is this: “AI can do it.” This vague phrase is like an open gate that allows anything in and out. As humans-in-the-loop, it’s our job to set the strategy, the parameters and exactly what pieces we’ll assign to AI and which will stay in human hands.

A friend reminded me as well that we don’t have to accept the relentless cheerfulness of our AI tools as a permanent default. It is fully within our power to dictate how we want AI to respond to us. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to play Devil’s advocate to your perspective. You can use it to find holes in your logic, point out weaknesses in your arguments. Ask: what am I missing? What else should I consider?

I’ll be honest. I tried this today, and it knocked the wind out of my sails. Perhaps it’s because I shared something fragile, a work-in-progress in its early stages. I wasn’t ready for brutal honesty in the cold light of day.

A human (a kind one) would have intuited that, flexing their response based on their knowledge of me. Of course, I can modulate my approach as well, commanding gentler feedback when it’s delicate.

The AI Balancing Act

It bears repeating that this moment is all about balance, and leaning into what makes us particularly human. Absolutely partner with AI in myriad ways, continuously honing your approach and techniques to fit your unique work and even emotional needs. But keep human-to-human conversations alongside your AI usage. The friction, the unpredictability, the mere fact of there being a fully dimensional being on the other side of the bubbles on your phone, is the essential counterpoint that will help us stay grounded in reality.