Does AI Need to Go Outside and Spend Time with Friends?

Kamden Baer

July 5, 2024

ChatGPT's rendition of a AI literally going outside and spending time with friends. [Image created by ChatGPT / DALL-E on July 5, 2024.]

A point I keep coming back to in my musings on AI, that I want to explore now and hopefully return to from different angles in the future, is this: what are our goals with ChatGPT? There are lots of different answers, and questions posed as answers that only lead to more questions, and I think they all might help clarify the current state of AI, as well as some of its past and future. I admire the big-picture thinkers that adhere to the idea that this chatbot is an artificial intelligence product—that we have constructed a concrete model of an intelligence different from that of human intelligence. I also respect the students and professionals simply trying to save time by doing a little less reading of their homework assignment or business report by using ChatGPT, but maybe in a slightly different way. These people have goals for their use of AI, motivations for these goals, and experiences that lead to these motivations.

I come to the table with my own perspectives, which inform my interactions with ChatGPT. As of late, my goals have tended toward getting away from the scrolling and the streaming and the screens, and instead I have been trying to get outside, to read, and to spend time with friends. I struggle to find ways in which these simple and arguably generic goals can be better accomplished with some form of AI, unless I were to use it to try to create some time-optimal schedule, yet I still shy away from this idea. I understand the appeal of AI in an office or school setting, which are both heavily inundated with technology already and might benefit from greater efficiencies, but what happens when the goal is not to be more efficient? This is a question I am discovering in my personal pursuits, where using ChatGPT is not necessarily a thought that crosses my mind. This opens up lots of questions about the goals of the users and creators of AI (maybe even of AI itself?), including which of these goals are being included and which are truly relevant. I mean, does AI need to go outside and spend time with friends?

Although this is just a small blurb of my thoughts and perhaps hesitancies to embrace artificial intelligence, my goal was merely to establish this apprehension that may be nothing more than ill-founded intuition. I look forward to exploring this doubt more thoroughly in the future and determining if this feeling remains or is just the initial uncertainty of unfamiliarity.