Let's chat, not just chatbot

Economic Times

14 hours ago

iStock Let the chatbot write your emails if it must. But don't let it take over your chai break rant or your unplanned, meandering chats that lead nowhere and yet leave you feeling more alive. My 32-year-old cousin recently met a girl through a matrimonial website. Just ten minutes into their conversation, she looked at him and said bluntly, 'Can you at least be more interesting than ChatGPT?' He was completely taken aback.When we say someone is interesting to talk to, we probably mean they are well read, have a good sense of humour and have gone through a wide variety of experiences in life. Today's chatbots like ChatGPT are definitely more well-read than all of us put together. They can also tell half funny jokes, which probably makes them better than ninety percent of the human population. That leaves us humans with just one area where we can claim superiority, the richness of lived experiences. But even that seems to be fading with people increasingly choosing safe and controlled environments.
Last Sunday I was catching up with my college friends and as always, we ended up repeating the same old stories from our campus days or the years right after. It struck me that we rarely have anything new to add. The reason is simple. We have not really created too many new experiences worth talking about. On the other hand, an AI chatbot has access to an endless library of interesting and funny incidents from the lives of people across the world. So, in terms of sheer variety and novelty in conversation, we are already falling behind. This is especially true for those of us living in cities who are always short of time and energy to meet people in person. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently mentioned that people are increasingly using ChatGPT for major life decisions such as career planning and even therapy. Before we end up completely surrendering to AI chatbots and start developing emotional relationships with them like the character Theodore did with the chatbot Samantha in the film, Her, we must pause and relearn the lost art of real human conversation. We must also make an effort to rediscover what makes us genuinely interesting as individuals.
Interesting conversations are not always meant to be serious. In fact, they are not meant to be anything in particular. There is a certain playfulness and randomness about them. They are not supposed to have a clear goal or outcome. They can be about anything and everything like a rant with a colleague, a nostalgic flashback to hostel life, a 3 AM chat about the meaning of life or even some mindless gossip. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari says, 'Gossip may seem like a bad habit, but it is essential for cooperation in large groups.' Conversations are the lubricant on which human sanity operates. Good conversations come more from the heart than the head. Sometimes they end with laughter, sometimes with a sigh of relief and sometimes they bring clarity. And sometimes they just make us feel less alone in our confusion about life decisions. They are not packaged like a motivational LinkedIn post or curated like a vacation reel on Instagram. They are simple, imperfect and real.There is an old saying that in a conversation one must either be interesting or be interested. These days, when we try to talk to someone, they are already half distracted. And even if they are not, most of us hardly have anything interesting to say. After all, the most entertaining content seems to be happening on Instagram or LinkedIn. Competing with the algorithm is a lost cause. You will lose every time.But there is one thing we can still do. We can stop being too safe all the time. We are slowly losing our spontaneity and emotional depth because of the fear of being judged or cancelled. The cancel culture has convinced many of us that it is not worth the trouble to be our natural selves, especially if being natural means saying one or two slightly inappropriate things without any bad intent. This fear has made us shrink into smaller versions of ourselves, constantly apologetic and hesitant under the weight of guilt and judgement that comes from others.Private conversations do not need to be politically correct. We are civilised beings, yes, but we are also instinctive and emotional creatures. We cannot keep suppressing every impulse or force ourselves to speak in a polished and filtered way like a large language model. Our speech should not be edited at every step between the heart and the mouth. We cannot always speak the obvious. We need to bring back our rawness and spontaneity.Darwin's theory of evolution tells us that the incredible variety of life we see today came from errors in genetic copying. If nature had a perfect system of reproducing genes without any deviation, we might still be single celled organisms floating around in the ocean. In the same way, if we always try to say the right things, we will end up behaving like machines. Our ability to feel deeply, to err, to be vulnerable is what makes us distinct humans and that might just be our one true strength in a future where AI does everything else better.Some people I encounter, always tend to say the right thing. But after a while, they start sounding like a chatbot, predictable and too perfect. They hide the real parts of themselves, especially the vulnerable side that makes us human. On social media, this becomes even worse, where one slice of a person's personality is projected as the whole self.But no matter how individualistic the world becomes, we are all connected by one simple truth, that is the human condition of suffering. As Buddha said, it is the most basic truth of human life. An AI can give advice from books, but it cannot feel pain. And without that, it can never truly understand us.If we keep outsourcing our thinking, our feeling and even our small talk to a chatbot, then soon the only raw, unfiltered conversation we will have left is the one we mumble in the shower. Let the chatbot write your emails if it must. But don't let it take over your chai break rant or your unplanned, meandering chats that lead nowhere and yet leave you feeling more alive. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.) Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. Can this cola maker get back bubble valuation pricked by Ambani?
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