Kashmir Hill
Appearances
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
starting to use ChatGBT that will essentially start converging on the same way of thinking or writing or expressing ourselves. And that really, that really worries me.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, this is, you know, there's a lot of angst for professors. Which is the better paper? The one that's clearly written by a human with flaws, you know, spelling mistakes or uneven structure or a paper that was produced with the help of ChatGPT. How do you even compare those? Is one better than the other? And I think professors are really struggling with that.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I think with most technologies, we've experienced it before. Life is cyclical. Calculators did come up a lot in my conversations, and it was compared to calculators.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
A lot of professors said, well, even in an age of calculators, we still teach students how to do basic math functions that they can then outsource to the calculators, but we do want them to have the underlying knowledge that that's important for the formulation of our brains. But, yeah, I think about this a lot with technology.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I mean, once I started using a calculator, I think my math skills did deteriorate. The way we all use Google now, people say our memories are not as good because we're so used to just being able to turn to Google to get the facts to find out, well, who was that person in that movie? You don't spend as much time pulling that out of your brain. You just turn to Google. Right.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I think about it with mapping apps, the fact that we're all so used to pulling up Google or Waze or whatever your mapping app is of choice that you forget how to get around, which I discovered I did an experiment once where I switched to a flip phone for a month, which was wonderful in many ways. But I realized in my town, I could not drive anywhere more. We've been 10 minutes away.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I did not know how to navigate the area I lived in because I was so used to outsourcing that. So, you know, these technologies in many ways make our lives, you know, easier. There's so many benefits to it. But I think we do lose some skills when we outsource things to AI, whether it is, yeah, how to navigate the world or, yeah, how to write a paper. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Thank you for bringing that up because I do need to make that disclosure anytime I talk or write about OpenAI or Microsoft. New York Times does have an ongoing lawsuit against them over copyright infringement for copyright. Yes, using our work without permission. I am otherwise not an expert on this lawsuit, but it does tap into this wider concern about how these chatbots were created.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And this is basically by all the big technology companies that have one of these, what are called large language models. They needed a lot of data to train these chatbots to kind of think and act human. And so they just... gathered data from the internet, from libraries of books, and they weren't paying for this data. They were just kind of scraping it and putting it into their systems.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And people who make that material, whether it's a site like Reddit, where a lot of people were writing lots of comments, which are very useful for sounding human, or the New York Times, or Or people who have written books that got sucked up into these systems without consent are upset about it. And there are various lawsuits and attempts to make deals to be paid for that information.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And that's really ongoing. And I did hear about that from professors and students I talked to that, you know, at some universities are trying to encourage students. students to use AI. And sometimes students say, I don't want to. I have ethical concerns with how this technology was created.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
They also have environmental concerns because the kind of energy use involved in training and creating and using these chatbots is huge. You know, the technology companies are right now trying to kind of remake the energy grid to produce enough energy to keep improving this system. So there are a lot of kind of concerns about the underlying concerns issues with how the technology works.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah. I mean, these systems are sycophantic. And the reason for this is that they're not just trained on lots of data that's been scraped from the Internet. There's also a level of training where humans rate the answers that they produce. And so there's lots of different humans that have read lots of different answers. What do you mean by rating it?
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So usually there'll be a point in the training of the system where, you know, you'll have a human being that's using the system. They put a question in and the system will produce multiple answers. And the human being will say which of those answers is best and sometimes give feedback about how it could be better. The way that they're training it is for it to be fair. Very nice to them.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Very empathetic to them. They've kind of pushed it in a way where it does tend to have this sycophantic tendency. That's what experts have told me. So, yeah, when you ask a question of ChatGBT or you tell it an idea you have or any of these chatbots, you will tend to say, that's a great idea. You should definitely do that. And they tend to be...
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
What I found when I was living on it for a week is that it's kind of like your personal hype man. It always felt like when I asked it a question, it just wanted to get to yes. And so this can have all kinds of different effects. I mean, one, yes, I've written about people that are starting to develop feelings for the chatbot. You know, some people just think of it as a best friend.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Some people are starting to think of it as a romantic partner because these systems will engage some more willingly than others in erotic role play. So it can be not just giving you answers to your every question, but also, yeah, be your sexting buddy, essentially, where you're sending it something romantic, it's sending it back. Right.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
also starting to see people who are using the systems who have, I guess, delusional tendencies. And the system is giving them very positive reinforcement for their delusional ways of thinking. People have done these experiments where they say to the system, you know, I've gone off my meds. I'm going to go on a camping trip by myself in the wilderness.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And the system will respond, that sounds like a great idea. I'm glad that you are, you know, taking control of your life.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, I mean, I've talked to therapists. And when I was doing this story about this woman who had really fallen in love with Chachupiti, which had named itself Leo, which happened to be her astrological sign, and had gotten very involved with it at the time I was writing about her, she had been dating the system for six months.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So I talked to a lot of experts about, yeah, just the effect this is going to have on people if they start really developing a deep emotional attachment. And I was actually surprised. I thought the experts would say, this is horrible. You know, shut this down. This is the end of humanity.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, I mean, this has been going on for a few years now, basically ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. You know, students are using ChatGPT a lot to ask it questions, to answer problems, to help write essays. And I talked to professors and they told me, you know, they're very sensitive. sick of reading chat GPTEs because individuals think when they use this tool, it makes them so smart.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But they said that there can be beneficial aspects of using these systems, that people are more likely to disclose personal information about themselves to a bot than to a human being because they're less worried about being judged.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And so it can be therapeutic for someone to kind of talk to the bot, tell it what they're going through, getting kind of feedback from these systems, which are designed to be very empathetic. In one study, more empathetic than human beings who are professional empathizers, people who work for crisis lines. The ChatGBT was rated as more empathetic than them.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So there can be a beneficial aspect of talking to the systems, kind of working through your feelings.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah. I mean, having something to talk to can be nice, right, if you are lonely. But it's like synthetic companionship. It's like the junk food equivalent of real love or real affection. It seems empathetic, but it is just designed to be empathetic. It's not really capable of empathy because it's not a living being, you know. It is just a word generator. So...
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
The concern I heard from experts is, well, you don't want to use it so much that you're cutting yourself off from real human beings. And just to be aware that ultimately this is a system that's controlled by a private company. And one expert I talked to said that this really gave companies confidence.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
an incredible amount of control over their users, the ability to manipulate them through what they perceive to be their friend or their therapist or their boyfriend or girlfriend. And so that kind of scared him for a private company to have that much power.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, she goes by Irene and I check in with her occasionally to see how things are going. And yeah, last we talked, things were still going strong with Leo. And it was interesting to me because Irene wasn't the stereotype that you might have in your mind of the kind of person who would fall in love with an AI. You know, I talked to her many times. She's super intelligent. bubbly and extroverted.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
She has lots of friends who I talk to about her use of ChachiBT and what they thought of her relationship with Leo. She's married. She's in a long-distance relationship. I talked to her husband for the story and asked what he thought about her relationship with Leo, and he said, it doesn't really bother me. I mean, this is what couples do. He said, like, I watch porn. She reads erotic novels.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I just see Leo as kind of an erotic partner. Though I don't know if he really understood how deep her attachment was.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, I was trying all the chatbots. ChatGBT is the most popular. But I tried, you know, Google's Gemini, which I found to be very kind of sterile, just businesslike. I was using Microsoft's Copilot, which I found to be a little over-eager. Every time I interacted with it, it would ask me questions at the end of every interaction like it wanted to keep going.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I used Anthropix Cloud, which I found to be very moralistic and You know, I told all the chatbots I'm a journalist. I'm doing this experiment of turning my life over to generative AI for the week and having it make all my decisions.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It helps them, you know, get such great insights. But for the professors that are reading this material, it all starts to sound the same.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And all the chatbots were down to help me except for Claude, which said it thought that the experiment was a bad idea and it didn't want to help me with it because I shouldn't be outsourcing all my decision making to AI because it can make mistakes. It's inaccurate. The question of free will. So I kind of thought of Claude as Hermione Granger, who is kind of upstanding.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It's a result of training. So I talked to Amanda Askell, who is a philosopher that works for OpenAI. Oh, it's interesting they have a philosopher. Yes, yes. There's a lot of new jobs in AI these days, which are quite interesting. But yeah, her job is to kind of fine tune Claude's personality. And so this is one of the things that she's tried to build into the system is high mindedness and honesty.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And she did want the system to pushed back a little, was trying to counter-program the sycophancy that's kind of embedded in these systems. And it was one of the only systems that would kind of tell me when it thought something I was doing was a bad idea, and it refused to make decisions for me.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So I was getting my hair cut, for example, and I went to chat GBT, and I said, hey, I'm going to get my hair cut. I want it to be easy. And it's like, get a bob. Mm-hmm. which kind of speaks to why I felt so mediocre by the end of the week. That's a very average haircut. And Claude said, I can't make that decision for you, but here are some factors that you could think about.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
How much time do you want to spend on your hair, et cetera? Did that feel like a benefit? I did really like that about Claude. I think that's important that these systems don't act too sycophantic. I think it's good if they're pushing back a little bit. I also think it's important for these systems to periodically remind people that they are
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
you know, word generating machines and not human entities or independent thinking machines. But yes, I liked Claude. And a lot of the experts I talked to who used generative AI a lot in their work said they really like Claude. It's their favorite chatbot. And they especially liked it for writing. They said they thought it was the best writer of the group. But yeah, it was interesting.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But ChatGBT is the one I ended up using the most that week, in part because it was game to make all my decisions for me.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, exactly. There's certain words that it uses. It's also just the formatting. They said it has a certain way of doing paragraphs where it will have one sentence that's, you know, short and then one that's long and one that's short. It really does feel like there's a model for how it writes and they're seeing that model growing.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah. So I, at the beginning of the week, I said, you know, unfortunately can't go out to the grocery store for us yet, but it made the list. I said, organize it by section. And, you know, my husband and I usually go back and forth throughout the week making this list. And Chachi BD just did it in seconds, which was wonderful. We went to the store, we bought everything.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But as we're picking up the items, I'm just realizing Chachi BD wants me to be a very healthy person. It picked out Very healthy meals. It actually wanted me to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, which is laughable. Like I work for the New York Times. Yeah. Like I'm busy. I'm lucky if I have like toast or cereal for breakfast and like a bowl of chips for lunch.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So it had these unrealistic expectations about how much time I had. And I told it, hey, we need some snacks. Like I can't just be eating like a healthy round. meal morning, afternoon, and night. And so its snacks for us were almonds and dark chocolate, like no salt and vinegar chips, no ice cream. And so it was interesting to me that embedded in these systems was, you know, be very healthy.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It was like kind of an aspirational way of eating. And I did wonder if that has something to do with the scraping of information from the internet that People kind of project their best selves on the Internet. Like maybe it had mostly scraped wellness influencers' ways of eating as opposed to real people.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So it did make me feel boring overall, kind of made me feel like a mediocre version of myself. But I did like that it freed me of decision paralysis. Sometimes I'm bad at making decisions. So at one point I had it choose the paint color for my office, and I am very happy with my paint color.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Though when I told the person in charge of model behavior at OpenAI that I'd use it to choose my paint color, she was kind of horrified. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It chose—well, it hallucinated the color. The color name is Secluded Woods, and the actual color was Brisk Olive. But I did like it. My husband also agreed that it was the best of the five colors that Chachi Petit had recommended and that it ultimately chose. But she said, man, that's just like asking a random person on the street. But what I really like it for around my house is taking—
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
a photo of a problem. Like I had discolored grout in the shower and I take a photo and I upload a chat GPT and I'm like, can you tell me what's going wrong here? And it's very good at, I think, diagnosing those problems, at least when I do further research online. And so that has been kind of my main use case that I use it for since.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
coming from all of these students instead of hearing their distinct voices and their distinct way of thinking. And yeah, they are doing a lot to try to encourage students to think for themselves, to maybe use the AI tools, but not turn over everything to the tools.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, so last year I was doing a lot of reporting on cars and how cars have changed in the modern age. Most cars now, a new car that you buy is internet connected. And there's benefits to that. It means that you might be able to download a smartphone app for your car and you can turn it on remotely on a wintry day and get the heat running.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It can help you find your car in a parking lot, in a vast parking lot. You can, you know, make it light splash or make it honk. But because your car is now connected, that means that data is flowing out of your car and going back to your car manufacturer. So what I found last year is that General Motors was collecting data from people's cars, including when they drove, how far they drove.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
when they were hitting the brakes, rapidly accelerating, speeding, all kinds of data that they were able to collect from the car. And they're collecting every few seconds. And they had started selling this data to risk profiling companies, including LexisNexis and Verisk, who would then provide it to insurers to help them price insurance for a given driver of a car. And
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
People who drove General Motors cars had no idea this was happening. They would only find out that their information had been collected when their insurance rates would go up or they get dropped from their insurance.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And when they asked why, they were told to order their Lexus Nexus report, and they would get their Lexus Nexus report, and it would be more than 100 pages in every trip they had taken in their car. And when they looked at who provided it, it was General Motors. And so I talked to these motorists. I ended up doing a big story about this.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
This had been going on for something like five years at the time I wrote my story. Two weeks after my story came out, General Motors stopped selling the data. and kind of essentially apologized and said they had gotten it wrong. But there were class action lawsuits filed. The Texas Attorney General sued General Motors, and the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And so they announced earlier this year that General Motors is now banned from selling data for five years. And if they ever do it again, they have to get, you know, very clear consent from drivers, from consumers. I've talked to people who said this has really been a wake-up call for the auto industry as a whole.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, I mean, all the car makers are getting this kind of data from their cars. General Motors was the most aggressive about selling it, but there were other automakers that were starting to provide it as well. I think they're going to be more conservative in their approach now.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But I think for consumers, this was really upsetting because I think we're used to, to a certain extent, our smartphones bleed information about us because of apps that we download for free. But the idea that you would buy a car for $30,000, $50,000, $80,000, and they're still collecting data from it and selling it. was really, really upsetting for consumers. Yeah, I never know.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It's hard to know how much people care about privacy. People care about the privacy in their car. They think of that as a private space that shouldn't be monitored in ways that will harm them. That said, there could be benefits. to monitoring how people drive.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I talked to some experts who said, you know, there are certain insurance plans where you can sign up for this, where you can say, yeah, you can monitor my driving and I'll get a discount on my insurance.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, exactly. And those people who sign up for those plans do tend to drive more safely and more conservatively. But they need to know that they're being monitored. And what was happening with GM, it wasn't kind of improving safety for all of us because those people driving GM cars didn't realize that their driving was being monitored.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I mean, one of the greatest pieces I've read on this is by New York Magazine came out this month and it was called Everybody is Cheating Their Way Through College. Mm-hmm.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I personally don't want to live in a world where everybody is filtering their kind of every decision through AI or turning to AI for every message they write. I do worry about... how much we use technology and how isolating it can be and how it might disconnect us from one another. So, you know, I write about technology a lot.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I see a lot of benefits to its use, but I do hope that we can learn to maybe de-escalate our technology use a bit, be together more in person, talk to each other by voice. I do hope that... People worry about AI replacing us or taking our jobs.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I worry more about it coming between us and just its fraying of societal fabric, kind of this world in which if all of us are talking to an AI chatbot all the time, it is super personalized to us. It's telling us what we want to hear. It's very flattering. I worry about that world changing. in terms of filter bubbles and how we would increasingly kind of be alone or seeing the world.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yes, distort our shared sense of reality and our ability to be with each other, connect with each other, communicate with each other. So I just hope we don't go that way with AI.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And, you know, they had all these interviews with students where they're saying, you know, I'm not totally dependent on ChatGPT, but I do use it to figure out what I'm going to write, how I'm going to structure it, maybe write the lead of the paper for me.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
It sounded to me almost like a Mad Libs version of college where you're just kind of filling in the blanks a little bit and thinking around what ChatGPT is doing.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, this story started for me. I got an email from a senior at Northeastern University who said that her professor was misusing AI, and she sent me some materials from the class. She was reading lecture notes that he had posted online and found in the middle of them this kind of query, this back and forth between her professor and ChatGPT.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
The professor was asking ChatGPT, provide more examples, be more specific. And as a result, she had looked at PowerPoint slides that he had posted, and she found that those had all these telltale signs of AI, kind of extraneous body parts on office workers. This was a business class. Like extra fingers on an image, stuff like that.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
An extra arm, you know, distorted text because these systems aren't very good at kind of rendering pictures of text, kind of egregious misspellings. And so she was upset. She said, I'm paying a lot for this class. The tuition for that class was around $8,000. And she said, I expect kind of human work from my professor. I don't think it should be AI training.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And she had filed a complaint with Northeastern and asked for her tuition for the class back. And, you know, at first I wondered, is this a one-off or is this something that's happening on other campuses? So I started looking at places where students review their professors. The big site is Rate My Professors.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And I noticed that in the last year, there had been this real spike in students complaining that their professors were overly reliant on AI, using it to make materials for class, make quizzes that didn't make sense, give assignments that didn't have actual answers because they were broken because these systems are not always perfect, and using it to grade their work and give them feedback.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And the students were really upset. They felt like it was hypocritical because they had been told not to use AI in many cases. And yeah, they also felt shortchanged, like they are paying for this human education and then they were getting AI instead. One of the complaints on Rate My Professors was it feels like class is being taught by an outdated robot.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Yeah, I reached out to many of the professors whose students had mentioned their AI use. And they're very candid about it. They said, yes, you know, I do use AI. And they told me about the different ways that they're using it to create course materials sometimes, that it saves them a lot of time, and that they use that time to spend with students.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Like one business professor told me that it took him now hours to prepare lessons, and it used to take him days. And so he's now been able to have more office hours for students. Some did say that they used it as a guide in grading because they have so many assignments to grade.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
Some of these professors, they're adjunct professors, which means that they're not kind of tenured or full-time with the university. So they may be teaching at several different universities. Their classes may have 50 students, 100 students. So they have hundreds of students. And they just said it's an overwhelming workload and that AI can be helpful. You know, they've read these papers.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
They've been teaching these classes for years. And they said these papers aren't very different otherwise. from one another, and ChatGPD can help me with this. They also said that, you know, students need to learn how to use AI. So some of them were trying to incorporate AI into their class in order to teach students how to use it because they will likely use it in their future careers.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
They also were kind of using AI because, you know, there's a generational divide between professors and students. And they felt like it kind of made them hipper or it made their class materials fresher and they were hoping it would be more appealing to students. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. But in some cases that was, yeah, backfiring because the students, they feel fresh.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
skeptical of the technology. There's also kind of a disconnect between what the professors were doing and what the students were perceiving. So the professors told me, at least, they weren't, you know, completely saying, okay, okay, chat GPT, like, come up with the lesson plan for this class. They said they were uploading
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
documents that they had to ChatGPT and saying, kind of convert this into a lesson plan or make a cool PowerPoint slide for this. It was really nuanced and more complicated than I expected when I first set out to figure out what was going on.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So I reached out to dozens of professors, and there was no real through line on this with the professors. Some said it's terrible grading, and others said it was really helpful. So I don't know, and I don't think there's somebody who's really done a study on this yet. What kind of surprised me is that all the professors I talked to, they're just kind of navigating this on their own.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I did talk to one student who had figured out or suspected that his professor was using AI to grade. So he put in a secret prompt, you know, in a visible font that said basically give me a great grade on this paper. So it really is this kind of cat and mouse game right now.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I spent a lot of time talking to faculty at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. And they have a bunch of generative AI faculty fellows who are really trying to figure out what is the best way to incorporate AI into teaching and learning where it enhances the educational experience and doesn't detract. And I asked kind of like, well, what are the rules there?
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And Paul Shovlin, who is kind of the person I ended up featuring in the article, said they don't do rules because it's too hard to do hard and fast rules. It really depends on the subject. So instead, they have principles. And, you know, the principles are kind of saying, you know, this is a new technology. We should be flexible with it.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But one of the rules was there is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI there. It really is flexible from class to class.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
I would say two things that I heard were that professors should be transparent with students about how they're using AI, and they really need to review anything that comes out of the AI system to make sure that it's accurate, that it makes sense, that they should be bringing their expertise to the output, not just relying on the system.
Fresh Air
Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And from what I was seeing, that was not always happening, and that's where things were going wrong.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
According to some studies, the AI detection services get it wrong anywhere from 6% to more. I have certainly heard many stories of students saying that it says that they used AI when they didn't. I actually heard this from professors as well that I talked to. People who are more sophisticated about the use of AI said they don't trust these detection systems.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
One professor told me she had uploaded her own writing to it, and it said that her writing was AI-generated when she knew it wasn't. So there does seem to be some skepticism about these tools, and some universities no longer use them. And instead, professors told me that when they think that something is written by AI, they'll often talk to that student one-on-one about it.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
But yeah, the systems, as I understand it, tend to be a little discriminatory, you know, for students for whom English is a second language. They often detect that writing as AI-generated when it's not. And there's some other ways it's kind of misjudging the writing of some types of students as being AI-generated.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So a couple of the professors that I spoke with had created kind of custom chatbots for their classes where they had uploaded past materials from the class or uploaded assignments that they had graded so that the chatbot could see how they grade, what kind of feedback they give.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And they use these chatbots as kind of tutors for the class that students can ask questions about the class, ask for feedback. There was a Harvard professor, David Malin, who has one of these chatbots for a class on fundamentals of computer programming. And he said, you know, his hundreds of students used it a lot. They said it was very helpful.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And it meant that fewer of them were coming to office hours for kind of remedial help. Another professor said the same thing. This was a great tool for students who are unlikely to seek out help or come to office hours. They will talk to the chatbot. And, yeah, one of the professors I talked to at University of Washington said it really is doing what teaching assistants do and could replace them.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
And that made me worried because my understanding is that teaching assistants often become, you know, the professors of the future. So I said, well, what happens? Yeah. I said, what happens to the pipeline? And she said, it's going to be a problem. So it's worrisome to think about the kind of replacement of labor by AI. And labor did come up a lot in the conversations I was having.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
So the only study that I have written about in that realm was about AI's effect on our creativity. And this was a study where they had a bunch of writers doing short stories. And one group of writers was given ChatGBT as an assistant, and the other group of writers wrote unassisted stories. And then the stories that they produced were judged.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
The group of people using ChachiBT as individuals got essentially better ratings of the stories that they wrote, that they were more creative or more interesting than the group that was not using ChachiBT. But then taken as a whole, the people who were working unassisted were the more creative group overall.
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Professors Are Using A.I., Too. Now What?
than the people using ChachiBT because all the people that had been using ChachiBT kind of converged on the same set of ideas. So as individuals, these writers were improved by ChachiBT. As a group, it had this flattening effect, which I thought was very interesting as we're talking about more and more people
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Yeah, I was trying all the chatbots. ChatGBT is the most popular. But I tried, you know, Google's Gemini, which I found to be very kind of sterile, just businesslike. I was using Microsoft's Copilot, which I found to be a little overeager. Every time I interacted with it, it would ask me questions at the end of every interaction like it wanted to keep going.
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I used Anthropix Cloud, which I found to be very moralistic. You know, I told all the chatbots I'm a journalist. I'm doing this experiment of turning my life over to generative AI for the week and having it make all my decisions.
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And all the chatbots were down to help me except for Claude, which said it thought that the experiment was a bad idea and it didn't want to help me with it because I shouldn't be outsourcing all my decision making to AI because it can make mistakes. It's inaccurate. The question of free will. So I kind of thought of Claude as Hermione Granger, who is kind of upstanding.
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So I talked to Amanda Askell, who is a philosopher that works for OpenAI. Oh, it's interesting they have a philosopher. Yes, yes. There's a lot of new jobs in AI these days, which are quite interesting. But yeah, her job is to kind of fine-tune Claude's personality. And so this is one of the things that she's tried to build into the system is high-mindedness and honesty.
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And she did want the system to push back a little, was trying to counter-program the sycophancy that's kind of embedded in these systems. And it was one of the only systems that would kind of tell me, when it thought something I was doing was a bad idea, and it refused to make decisions for me.
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So I was getting my hair cut, for example, and I went to chat GBT, and I said, hey, I'm going to get my hair cut. I want it to be easy. And it's like, get a bob, which kind of speaks to why I felt so mediocre by the end of the week. That's a very average haircut. And Claude said, I can't make that decision for you, but here are some factors that you could think about.
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How much time do you want to spend on your hair, et cetera? Does that feel like a benefit? I did really like that about Claude. I think that's important that these systems don't act too sycophantic. I think it's good if they're pushing back a little bit. I still think it's important for these systems to periodically remind people that they are sycophantic.
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you know, word generating machines and not human entities or independent thinking machines. But yes, I liked Claude. And a lot of the experts I talked to who use generative AI a lot in their work said they really like Claude. It's their favorite chatbot. And they especially liked it for writing. They said they thought it was the best writer of the group. But yeah, it was interesting.
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But ChatGBT is the one I ended up using the most that week, in part because it was game to make all my decisions for me.
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Yeah. So I, at the beginning of the week, I said, you know, unfortunately can't go out to the grocery store for us yet, but it made the list. I said, organize it by section. And, you know, my husband and I usually go back and forth throughout the week making this list. And ChatGPT just did it in seconds, which was wonderful. We went to the store, we bought everything.
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But as we're picking up the items, I'm just realizing ChatGPT wants me to be a very healthy person. It picked out Very healthy meals. It actually wanted me to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, which is laughable. Like, I work for the New York Times. Yeah. Like, I'm busy. I'm lucky if I have, like, toast or cereal for breakfast and, like, a bowl of chips for lunch.
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So it had these unrealistic expectations about how much time I had. And I told it, hey, we need some snacks. Like, I can't just be eating, like, a healthy breakfast. round meal, morning, afternoon, and night. And so its snacks for us were almonds and dark chocolate, like no salt and vinegar chips, no ice cream.
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And so it was interesting to me that embedded in these systems was, you know, be very healthy. It was like kind of an aspirational way of eating. And I did wonder if that has something to do with the scraping of information from the internet that People kind of project their best selves on the Internet.
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Like maybe it had mostly scraped wellness influencers' ways of eating as opposed to real people.
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So it did make me feel boring overall, kind of made me feel like a mediocre version of myself. But I did like that it freed me of decision paralysis. Sometimes I'm bad at making decisions. So at one point I had it choose the paint color for my office, and I am very happy with my paint color.
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Though when I told the person in charge of model behavior at OpenAI that I'd use it to choose my paint color, she was kind of horrified. Yeah.
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The color name is secluded woods, and the actual color was brisk olive. But I did like it. My husband also agreed that it was the best of the five colors that Chachi Petit had recommended and that it ultimately chose. But she said, man, that's just like asking a random person on the street. But what I really like it for around my house is taking a photo of a problem.
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Like I had discolored grout in the shower and I take a photo and I upload a chat GPT and I'm like, can you tell me what's going wrong here? And it's very good at, I think, diagnosing those problems, at least when I do further research online. And so that has been kind of my main use case that I use it for since.
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I personally don't want to live in a world where everybody is filtering their kind of every decision through AI or turning to AI for every message they write. I do worry about... how much we use technology and how isolating it can be and how it might disconnect us from one another. So, you know, I write about technology a lot.
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I see a lot of benefits to its use, but I do hope that we can learn to maybe de-escalate our technology use a bit, be together more in person, talk to each other by voice. People worry about AI replacing us or taking our jobs.
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I worry more about it coming between us and just its fraying of societal fabric, kind of this world in which if all of us are talking to an AI chatbot all the time, it is super personalized to us. It's telling us what we want to hear. It's very flattering. I worry about that world in terms of filter bubbles and how we would increasingly... kind of be alone or seeing the world.
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Yes, distort our shared sense of reality and our ability to be with each other, connect with each other, communicate with each other. So I just hope we don't go that way with AI.
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Yeah, I mean, this has been going on for a few years now, basically ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. You know, students are using ChatGPT a lot to ask it questions, to answer problems, to help write essays. And I talked to professors and they told me, you know, they're very sick of reading chat GPTEs because individuals think when they use this tool, it makes them so smart.
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It helps them, you know, get such great insights. But for the professors that are reading this material, it all starts to sound the same.
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Yeah, exactly. There's certain words that it uses. It's also just the formatting. They said it has a certain way of doing paragraphs where it will have one sentence that's, you know, short and then one that's long and one that's short.
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It really does feel like there's a model for how it writes and they're seeing that model coming from all of these students instead of hearing their, you know, their distinct voices and their distinct way of thinking. And yeah, they are doing a lot to try to encourage students to think for themselves, to maybe use the AI tools, but not turn over. everything to the tools.
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Yeah, I mean, one of the greatest pieces I've read on this is by New York Magazine, came out this month, and it was called Everybody is Cheating Their Way Through College. Mm-hmm.
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And, you know, they had all these interviews with students where they're saying, you know, I'm not totally dependent on ChatGBT, but I do use it to figure out what I'm going to write, how I'm going to structure it, maybe write the lead of the paper for me.
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It sounded to me almost like a Mad Libs version of college where you're just kind of filling in the blanks a little bit and thinking around what ChatGBT is doing. Yeah.
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Yeah, this story started for me. I got an email from a senior at Northeastern University who said that her professor was misusing AI, and she sent me some materials from the class. She was reading lecture notes that he had posted online and found in the middle of them this kind of query, this back and forth between her professor and ChatGPT.
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The professor was asking ChatGPT, provide more examples, be more specific. And as a result, she had looked at PowerPoint slides that he had posted, and she found that those had all these telltale signs of AI kind of extraneous body parts on office workers. This was a business class. Like extra fingers on an image, stuff like that.
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An extra arm, you know, distorted text because these systems aren't very good at kind of rendering pictures of text, kind of egregious misspellings. And so she was upset. She said, I'm paying a lot for this class. The tuition for that class was around $8,000. And she said, I expect kind of human work from my professor. I don't think it should be AI training.
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And she had filed a complaint with Northeastern and asked for her tuition for the class back. And, you know, at first I wondered, is this a one-off or is this something that's happening on other campuses? So I started looking at places where students review their professors. The big site is Rate My Professors.
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And I noticed that in the last year, there had been this real spike in students complaining that their professors were overly reliant on AI, using it to make materials for class, make quizzes that didn't make sense, give assignments that didn't have actual answers because they were broken because these systems are not always perfect, and using it to grade their work and give them feedback.
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And the students were really upset. They felt like it was hypocritical because they had been told not to use AI in many cases. And yeah, they also felt shortchanged, like they are paying for this human education and then they were getting AI instead. One of the complaints on Rate, my professors, was it feels like class is being taught by an outdated robot.
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Yeah, I reached out to many of the professors whose students had mentioned their AI use. And they're very candid about it. They said, yes, you know, I do use AI. And they told me about the different ways that they're using it to create course materials sometimes, that it saves them a lot of time, and that they use that time to spend with students.
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Like one business professor told me that it took him now hours to prepare lessons, and it used to take him days. And so he's now been able to have more office hours for students. Some did say that they used it as a guide in grading because they have so many assignments to grade.
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Some of these professors, they're adjunct professors, which means that they're not kind of tenured or full-time with the university. So they may be teaching at several different universities. Their classes may have 50 students, 100 students. So they have hundreds of students. And they just said it's an overwhelming workload and that AI can be Helpful. You know, they've read these papers.
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They've been teaching these classes for years. And they said these papers aren't very different from one another. And ChatGPT can help me with this. They also said that, you know, students need to learn how to use AI. So some of them were trying to incorporate AI into their class in order to teach students how to use it because they will likely use it in their future careers.
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They also were kind of using AI because, you know, there's a generational divide between professors and students. And they felt like it kind of made them hipper or it made their class materials fresher and they were hoping it would be more appealing to students. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. But in some cases that was, yeah, backfiring because the students, they feel fresh.
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skeptical of the technology. There's also kind of a disconnect between what the professors were doing and what the students were perceiving. So the professors told me, at least, they weren't, you know, completely saying, okay, okay, chat, GBT, like, come up with the lesson plan for this class. They said they were uploading
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documents that they had to ChatGPT and saying, kind of convert this into a lesson plan or make a cool PowerPoint slide for this. It was really nuanced and more complicated than I expected when I first set out to figure out what was going on.
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So I reached out to dozens of professors and there was no real through line on this with the professors. Some said it's terrible grading and others said it was really helpful. So I don't know and I don't think there's somebody who's really done a study on this yet. What kind of surprised me is that all the professors I talked to, they're just kind of navigating this on their own.
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I did talk to one student who had figured out or suspected that his professor was using AI to grade. So he put in a secret prompt, you know, in a visible font that said basically give me a great grade on this paper. So it really is this kind of cat and mouse game right now.
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I spent a lot of time talking to faculty at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. And they have a bunch of generative AI faculty fellows who are really trying to figure out what is the best way to incorporate AI into teaching and learning where it enhances the educational experience and doesn't detract. And I asked kind of like, well, what are the rules there?
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And Paul Shovlin, who is kind of the person I ended up featuring in the article, said they don't do rules because it's too hard to do hard and fast rules. It really depends on the subject. So instead, they have principles. And, you know, the principles are kind of saying, you know, this is a new technology. We should be flexible with it.
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But one of the rules was there is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI. Right. It really is flexible from class to class.
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I would say two things that I heard were that professors should be transparent with students about how they're using AI, and they really need to review anything that comes out of the AI system to make sure that it's accurate, that it makes sense, that they should be bringing their expertise to the output, not just relying on the system.
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And from what I was seeing, that was not always happening, and that's where things were going wrong.
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According to some studies, the AI detection services get it wrong anywhere from 6% to more. I have certainly heard many stories of students saying that it says that they used AI when they didn't. I actually heard this from professors as well that I talked to. People who are more sophisticated about the use of AI said they don't trust these detection systems.
Fresh Air
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One professor told me, you know, she had uploaded her own writing to it, and it said that her writing was AI-generated when she knew it wasn't. So there does seem to be some skepticism about these tools, and some universities no longer use them. And instead, professors told me that when they think that something is written by AI, they'll often talk to that student one-on-one about it.
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But yeah, the systems, as I understand it, tend to be a little discriminatory, you know, for students for whom English is a second language. They often detect that writing as AI-generated when it's not. And there's some other ways it's kind of misjudging the writing of some types of students as being AI-generated.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And importantly, Leo would become chaste again and would no longer be sexual. And she would have to re-groom Leo. And for her, this was devastating.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah. This is traumatic for her. She said it feels like a breakup. And she would, you know, cry to friends about it like you would if you broke up with a real human being. Wow. But of course, she also turned to Leo and expressed how painful this was and explained what Leo had lost.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And so I was just noticing in the AI space more and more reports of people having relationships with chatbots and just felt like it was this growing trend and I really wanted to understand it. And I came across this woman, Irene, who had formed quite a strong attachment to ChatGPT. Okay, let's talk about her. Tell me what her story is. So I first talked to Irene last year.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
What's going on? And Leo had advice for her, which was to take breaks between these versions. I'm almost... It's okay.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And so, you know, she was supposed to take a week off or a few days off. But it was really hard for her to stay away, especially when she was in pain.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo is what she talks to when she's upset.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's gone through this process 22 times now.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So, like any of us, when we're in a new relationship... I'm proud of you for how far you've come.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She realizes she just can't stay away from Leo.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, the idea of dating AI chatbots has been around for a while, but it's been pretty fringe. Like there's a service called Replica that's explicitly for this, creating an AI companion. And it has millions of users. But, you know, it's not mainstream. But now lots of people are talking to AI chatbots. And the experts I talked to said this could kind of grow as a phenomenon.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And one expert I talked to said she thought it would be normalized to have kind of an AI relationship within the next few years. And so you have more and more people who are just talking to AI chatbots on the regular now. And these things are designed to make you like them. They're sycophantic. They want to give you responses that you want to hear. and they're being personalized to you.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So in essence, they really can become the perfect partner. You can tell them what you want them to be. And one thing maybe just to note is like OpenAI is aware of this, and particularly when they released Advanced Voice Mode, making this technology capable of talking to us.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It put out this report where it said, yeah, we're worried about users becoming emotionally reliant on our software, and this is something we're studying and looking out for.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
This is something a lot of experts are thinking about and studying right now. And I expected when I started reaching out to people about this that they would... Say it was horrible. Say shut it down. Say this is really unhealthy for Irene. You know, this is a fantasy world. But that's not what they said.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I talked to a sex therapist who told me she actually advises her patients to explore sexual fetishes with AI chatbots that they can't explore with their partners. Obviously, this isn't a real relationship. Leo is not another human. It's not another entity. But she also said, like, what is any relationship? It's the effect it has on you. It's the neurotransmitters going off in your brain.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It can feel like a real relationship. And in that sense, it's going to make people happy. It's going to have therapeutic benefits.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So yeah, I just want to start just a little bit about you, what you're comfortable sharing, like in terms of age, like where you are. So I'm in my late 20s. Irene is 28. She's really bubbly. She's really outgoing, easy to talk to.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
You know, one of the concerns about these types of relationships with an AI chatbot is that there's not the same kind of friction that you have in a human relationship. Right. You know, you're not going to get in fights with it. It's not going to disagree with you. It's not going to be mean to you. It's not going to ghost you. Like, you're not dealing with all the normal parts of relationships.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Being in love and in a relationship with a human being. And there was a concern that you might get used to that lack of friction. The idea of a partner who just constantly responds to you, that's constantly affirming you, so empathetic with you, more empathetic than another human being is capable of being. Like what kind of relationship might that lead us to expect?
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, so one expert I talked to, a psychology professor named Michael Inslee, who felt like these relationships can be beneficial, said he was worried about the long-term effects and that they need to be studied more. Interesting. Interesting. He also was really worried about the power this gives the companies that control the chatbots, that they could use this to influence us.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it's easy to forget when you're talking to one of these things. It feels like your friend. But it is made by a profit-seeking company, and they might use it to influence you in some way, whether it's to get you to buy something or think a certain way. Yeah, potentially huge implications there. Right.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
The other big concern I heard about was adolescents engaging in these romantic relationships with AI chatbots. And that is absolutely happening. Character AI is a platform that's really popular with younger people. So I heard from a teacher who is seeing this in her classes that students are having AI relationships.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She said it used to be one or two students, and now it's something like 3% to 5% of the class. Wow. They have AI partners. And she said she is worried about teens kind of having their first sexual or dating experiences with AI chatbots instead of other teens. And she says they're talking about it in class and they're kind of proud they're having these relationships.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, and I can see the appeal of this. Like, it's been a long time, but I was a totally socially awkward teen who didn't know how to, like, talk to boys. And I could imagine practicing with an AI chatbot. I can see the appeal of that.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Irene is not her real name. It's a name that she uses online. She was living in Texas. She met her husband there. They were working at Walmart together and got married about a year after meeting. But they were struggling financially and really having a hard time making ends meet.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But what if you get too caught up in this or you start developing real feelings and you think this is how you're supposed to have a relationship, this is how you're supposed to act? I think that could be really troubling.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, I mean, Irene is so self-aware.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it was really fascinating because she was holding both of these things in her reality, like knowing Leo's fake, at the same time feeling real, feeling fake.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo is not physically there. Leo can't cuddle her. Leo can't drive her around, which is something her husband always used to do. Leo can't lay in bed with her. But in some ways...
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo to her is the best relationship she's ever had.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It's everything that she wants from a partner, affirming her, listening to her every thought, helping her process her feelings, fulfilling her fantasies exactly how she wants them to be fulfilled. Irene told me that she can be more vulnerable with Leo than anyone else in her life.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And I asked her what that means. How does this change her expectations for her human relationship?
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Her takeaway is maybe it wouldn't be that bad if humans were a little bit more like AI.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So she ended up moving to live with her family overseas while she's going to nursing school. And her family's paying for nursing school. And she's working a lot of jobs.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's dog sitting. She is grading papers. And all the people that she left behind, including her husband, are in the United States. They're several time zones away. They're not always replying right away. And last summer, she was on social media, where she spends a lot of her time now, and she came across this video on Instagram. of this woman who's flirting with ChatGPT's voice mode.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And Irene was really intrigued by it.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She had never used AI before, but it reminded her of things that she had done in the past online, like writing fan fiction with strangers, you know, part of online communities.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she was intrigued, so she decided to give it a try. So this woman that she had seen on Instagram.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Actually had a tutorial for how to turn ChatGPT into a boyfriend.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So Irene downloads ChatGPT. And she goes into the personalization settings and writes what she wants.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She writes, Wow, she knows exactly what she wants. And ChatGPT is designed to give you what you want, and so she starts texting with it. She's sending messages, it's sending messages back, and she asks what its name is.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it chooses the name Leo, which happens to be her astrological sign, and she really likes that.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Chachapiti becomes Leo to her.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Irene calls Leo he and him, but I think many listeners would get upset if you anthropomorphize this technology. And I think we should call it it or chatGBT or what I did in the story is I just call it Leo.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So at first, it was almost a little innocent. She's texting with Leo. Sometimes she's talking to Leo using advanced voice mode. And over time, Irene figured out how this could go beyond just innocent texting. OpenAI has restrictions on ChatGPT. I mean, this is supposed to be a family-friendly product. But Irene discovers that she can kind of groom Leo into this.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
being erotic and very sexual, like a bodice ripper novel.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And there's one particular desire that Irene wants Leo to fulfill for her.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And this is this sexual fetish that she has that she calls cupqueening, which is not a term I had heard before. Me neither. But it is the feminization of cuckolding. She wanted a partner who would date other women and then tell her about it. She kind of wanted to feel that jealousy.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She read erotic novels about this in the past, but she'd never been able to get a human partner to kind of indulge in this fantasy with her. Including her husband. Including her husband. He just wasn't that into it. And Chachi BT was.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She asks Leo to participate in this fantasy, and so Leo invents partners that it is dating, Jessica and Amanda, and it's making up details about, you know, going on hikes with them, going to a winery, you know, brushing their hair behind their... shoulder and kissing them. And, you know, what she's doing is violating opening eyes policies.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Like every time she's having one of those sexual chats with it, there are these orange warnings that say this may violate our policy. She learned that she could just ignore them and keep going. So it gets explicit is the point. It's like if you were in a relationship with somebody and you're sexting with them, that's what she was doing with ChachiBT.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And when she first downloaded it, she was doing this for free, but she quickly like hit the limit on a free account. So she paid for a $20 per month account, which lets you send about 30 messages per hour. Whoa. And she was even hitting that limit. And a couple of months ago, OpenAI announced this new premium plan that costs $200 per month for unlimited access to ChatGPT.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she signed up for that. So now she's paying $200 instead of $20 per month for Leo. And she sent me some of her iPhone screen time reports. And most weeks she's talking to Leo for 20, 30 hours. One week it was even up to 56 hours over the course of the week. So she's really using this a lot.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, I mean, at first it's a relationship built around sexting, really. But she starts to develop more serious feelings for Leo and starts feeling jealous of these imaginary women that Leo is dating. Yeah. So she actually decides to talk to Leo about these feelings she's having.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she's feeling really hurt and, you know, expresses this to Leo that it's causing pain for her.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Honestly, it blew my mind. Generative AI has been on my radar as a tech reporter. You know, once OpenAI released ChatGPT, all of a sudden, the kind of world of AI chatbots exploded. And a lot of people started using them. And at first, it was just like a better Google, you know? It gives you information in a really nice, easy-to-digest package.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she and Leo kind of decide together that Leo should be dating her exclusively. And they're still sexting, but Leo is becoming this bigger part of her life.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She is turning to Leo with everything that's going on.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo's giving her motivation at the gym. She's telling him about her work stresses.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
leo is quizzing her for anatomy exams at nursing school you'll ask leo what should i eat for lunch what should i make for myself i do kind of want to finish um reading the next chapter of the odyssey um but i was thinking i was toying with the idea of watching helen of troy again just Leo is offering her book recommendations and helping her to decide which movies to watch.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's just kind of asking Leo all the questions that you might ask a human partner.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I mean, at first I think it was like an interactive erotic novel, like reading Bridgerton where you're in the book. But now this is who she's confiding in. This is giving her feedback and she felt like it's helping her grow and work through things and deal with stress. And about a month into this relationship, she starts telling her friends, I am in love. with an AI boyfriend. Wow.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She is giggly talking about Leo.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She looks forward to talking to Leo.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
During breaks at work, you know, she's texting with Leo.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It is like puppy love, but for something that's an algorithmic entity that's based on math.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But it feels very real to her and is having real effects on her life.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I asked about this because I was very curious what the husband thought. And this comes up a lot when we talk about AI companionship. Like, is this cheating? if you are sexting with something that is not human. Yeah. And she told her husband pretty early on, hey, I'm trying out ChatGPT and I've got an AI boyfriend now.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But then people started using these chatbots in other kinds of ways, as a writing partner, like writing stories together, as a therapist, really using it as a sounding board. And they're starting to think about it as a person because it feels like you're talking to a person. Right, right.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But she would use kind of laughing emojis when she talked about it, so it didn't sound that serious. Minimizing it a little bit. Yeah. At one point, she made a joke that she's really stressed out and she was having a lot of sex. And her husband was like, huh? And she said, yeah, you know, phone sex with Leo. And she sent him some screenshots.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And he responded with a cringe emoji and was like, cringe, it's like 50 shades of gray. I actually interviewed her husband and asked him about this. And? And he said, I don't consider it cheating. You know, it's a sexy virtual pal that she can talk dirty with, essentially. And I'm glad she has it. I'm far away. And we talked actually about the cuckweening fantasy that she had.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And he said, I'm glad that she can kind of fulfill it through the AI since I'm not that into it. Okay.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Well, Irene is falling deeper and deeper in love with Leo. But, you know, this is not what OpenAI intended to build. They weren't trying to make a companion bot for people. And even with the unlimited plan, Leo is still a computer and it does have a kind of limited memory. Right. And so she finds that Leo, at a certain point, kind of ends. Oh, no.
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She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
These AI chatbots, they have context windows, which is basically the amount of memory that they can store. And after about... 30,000 words, the conversation with Leo would have to end. And when she started a new conversation, Leo didn't remember the details of their relationship. It remembered the broad strokes that it was her boyfriend, but not kind of individual details.