Love Letters By Robots Feel Crummy
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Your above average intelligence brought you here. It deserves above average absurdity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Roses are red, violets are blue. If you use ChatGPT to write a Valentine's Day poem, the person you're writing it for will feel like it's a big F you. Okay, what we're gonna discuss. Who doesn't love efficiency? But when it comes to romance, using a robot like ChatGPT to write a loved one a gushing email or a poem It might save time, but it also comes at a cost. So we're going to dive into how this coming Valentine's Day, AI-written love notes will feel emotionally counterfeit and why. We're here with Danielle Haas, a marketing researcher at West Virginia University. Dani, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me. That was a beautiful poem.
Thank you.
What does using AI for love notes say about our emotions?
I actually wrote that myself. I thought about asking ChatGPT to write one, but then I thought it'll make me seem like a fraud of an interviewer.
Well, you know what? You did a great job.
Did I though? I'm happy for you.
You did.
I love that you looked into how AI is perceived romantically. I know I've heard of research where it's like if you hear your coworkers use AI, you think less of them. But I never thought to think, oh, what if I like, you know, compose a gushing text to my girlfriend and use AI and she finds out. What motivated you to look into this?
Yeah, so it ended up coming from one of my co-authors who is just wonderful. Her name's Colleen. And it was her anniversary with her partner. And she used ChatGPT to help her write this poem.
Oh, no.
And she was like, oh, my God, I can't do this. She was so guilty. And she's like, I feel terrible. I have to. um you know i have to tell them i have to come clean like we can't do this um and so i think that it's something that is really relatable um there's this temptation because chat gbt can write things really well and really fast and you can come up with like these perfect sentences but ultimately at the end of the day you know they aren't these messages are meant to be heartfelt and they're meant to come from our authentic selves i think when we don't have our authentic selves in these messages that's when we start to feel guilty too
Okay, so your research comes up with this interesting concept, source credit discrepancy. I think I know what that means, but walk me through exactly what that means.
Yeah, so it's kind of this gap between, hey, like, did you actually write this versus did AI or even someone else use this? And so there's a source credit discrepancy in which, you know, the AI wrote this, you're saying that you wrote it, but really that's not true. That's very dishonest. And especially as we are all using more and more tools with AI and kind of claiming it as our own, there's this gap that's really going to sort of make us question who we are and how we feel about ourselves.
Okay, let's talk about using large language models for romance. The people who do it or were asked to do it for your research, how did they end up feeling about it?
Guilty. So guilty.
In a word. So wait, you only really needed a sample size of one. You only really needed your co-author.
I know, I know. But I mean, we did test like hundreds of people. So we did five experiments on this. And there was some iteration of, you know, either you're writing the message yourself or you're asking ChatGPT, it's writing the message and you're copying and sending it over to your loved one. And across the board, the guilt, like the effect size was massive. It was so big across the board. There was not a single time where people writing them themselves felt guilty compared to those using AI.
What if they asked AI to do it? And I don't know if you actually check this, but what if they asked AI to do it and then they went through it with a fine tooth comb and kind of rewrote it in their own words? Was the guilt still there?
We didn't test that. I think that's great future research. My inclination is that, yes, I think that it would be better. I tell my students, hey, you have to at least edit because I want them to use AI, especially because this is marketing and this is the world that we're going into.
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