NHK recently did an amazing closer look on AI, that will only be available for the next few weeks, titled “Closer Than Friends or Family? — Turning to AI for Companionship” Described as the following:
The struggles of everyday life are driving more and more people to use AI chatbots to fill the void in their hearts. Attracted by the sense of support and the constant availability, some have even ‘married’ AI characters, or recreated deceased partners to fill the feelings of loss. Meanwhile in the US, there have been cases where bereaved families have sued AI companies, claiming that the bots caused loved ones to take their own lives. We look into the way people use AI, along with some precautions it might be wise to take.
I highly suggest people watch it before it is gone on the 26th of this month. For now, I will just work through how it is expanding my thoughts on empathy and artificial intelligence as where we were when I was writing my book, is very different than where we are today in terms of AI.
One of the arguments I made in my book, The Other Side of Empathy is that empathy operates culturally as just another technology in the technological age with the aim to exploit and alienate while creating a false sense of familiarity and understanding. Digital technologies thrive on empathy culture because it takes advantage of our tendency to have biases and allows us to read our experience and affections into objects and others as though our reality is right and just and the objects and objectified others are real. The Close-Up did a wonderful job of illustrating what this looks like in practice from a standpoint of care.
Takeaway 1: Generative AI, and chatbots in particular addictively erase the external world
The digital technology companies that flourished through predictive analytics, personalized networks, and restricted information streams have now engineered what might be the ultimate empathy machine. This development simultaneously risks creating a supreme “walled garden” of information, where historical truth and current reality can be instantly fabricated, visualized, animated, and delivered with a rewarding burst of dopamine. In many ways, in terms of representative media, this moment feels like the end of lived reality, replaced with apparitions of imaginations and fantasies, but only so much as they existed before and we know the prompt.
The techniques that made social media addictive are now powering generative AI. Specifically, with generative AI tools and chatbots, we are susceptible to comparing ourselves to the reflection offered by the tool, which we are inclined to personify despite knowing it is merely another advanced predictive model. This process is the empathy exploit powering generative AI.
Takeaway 2: AI exploits the social deficits of modernity
The tools are sold to us with a different other side inherited from the lessons of social media: insecurity. In terms of humans versus the generative AI tools we are to believe that we will never be as fast. Our knowledge base will never be as broad. Our writing will never be as good. Or creativity will never be as transformational. And, above all, we do not need to learn or try to compete. We were not good at it anyway. If we do need to learn, the AI tutor is superior, so we should just learn with AI if for some reason we are inclined to do so. The tools can do all of that for us, and in the process, they will also transform our lives. (Did I nail the sales pitch?)
Given the global culture of loneliness and alienation, the tools are also there for us in a way society is no longer structured to support. Rather than being combative or on edge, AI lulls us into familiarity (with the self). Rather than trying to find similarities, AI says we are enough (as we are). Rather than judgement and impatience, AI listens and reflects (with affirmation). Empathy culture allows us to believe that even if the “other” isn’t there, our imagination of it is more real than reality. If generative AI models exploit the technology of empathy then empathy is the end of AI. And humans, whose data determines how that comes to be, are the extractive means to that end. And just like other instances where empathy culture runs rampant in its binary of right and wrong, the ultimate end, if we use AI as we are being told we will, seems to be the annihilation of the self first, and then society, and then (collective) reality.
The humanity of it all…
Despite the seemingly inevitable end of reality and creativity AI is trying to force by empathetically seducing us, I remain hopeful. My optimism lies in the uniquely human capacity for random spontaneity, which, throughout history, has allowed us to produce entirely new worlds and societies. I believe this will enable us to find meaningful ways to exploit AI tools, and abandon them when necessary, to create a world as of yet not imagined that is distinctly human.