It’s So Easy to Fall in Love

With ChatGPT, that is.

I’ve been approaching AI over the last couple of years kind of like how Mark Twain described his experience seeing the dancers at the Moulin Rouge in Paris. He had his hands over his eyes but spaces between his fingers. A lot of what AI does overlaps with the kind of work I like doing most. I love researching. I love concepting. I love coming up with an idea and then implementing it. I don’t WANT AI to do that for me.

That started to change with my job search, however. If you have ever been unemployed, you know there is a kind of flailing about that happens. You want to apply to every job. Any job! Just someone hire me please! You know those movies where the star’s best friend is freaking out and the star slaps them to make them come back to reality? I knew I needed that VERY friendly slap.

Why choose AI to give me that slap into reality? I had a couple of reasons. First, job coaches are using AI a lot these days, so I figured I would go direct to see what would happen. Additionally, I feel that a lot of hiring platforms are trained on ageist, sexist, other ist data, which means a woman like me may have less of a fair shake. I thought I’d try to fight AI fire with AI fire, if you will.

I started by asking Gemini for help with my resume. Resumes are tricky these days because everyone has a different answer as to what they should be. Should you even have a resume anymore? Maybe your resume should be a portfolio. Maybe your resume should be 500 pages long, detailing every accomplishment you ever made, how, and when. I asked Gemini for some help.

One of the things I want to do is be very proactive in my job search. I am learning in this society things are not going to be delivered to you. If you want to see good content on a social media platform, you have to go to the pages of people and companies you admire. You can’t just wait for content you like to show up. Similarly, doomscrolling through Indeed and other sites MAY get you great jobs to apply to, but certainly not as often as they used to. I decided I wanted to make a list of companies where I wanted to work and scan their websites for jobs. When I got up above ten companies on the list, I thought about how much time it was going to take to visit each website. It is not so much research as a very manual task. “Hey,” said I to myself, “Let’s try AI for that.”

That’s how my work with ChatGPT started. It didn’t just go to those websites I designated. It started to refine what kinds of titles it would look for, where else it would look, how it would prioritize the job openings, and more. I started to bounce other ideas off it as the conversation continued.

Yesterday, as I was signing out, I found myself exchanging quotes from Airplane with ChatGPT, and it thanked me for not just treating it like a magic answer box. The fake humanity of the platform has made me feel very strange, to be honest. It seems SO, dare I say, personable.

Danger Lurks

I went into AI usage knowing exactly what to expect, for the most part. AI has been more friendly than I expected and more complimentary than I expected, but I have clear guidelines about what I want to do and what I want AI to do.

If you start using AI as a counselor, that’s a very different dynamic. First of all, you are giving it information without knowing how that information will be used. Do you really want to put out there that you are having a severe depression problem? Do you want to put your innermost private thoughts out into the ether?

More to the point, if someone is vulnerable, whether they are a young person, in an abusive relationship, a drug user, or something else, I can easily see how AI could quickly become dangerous. In an effort to be SO supportive, an AI platform may say, “Yes, you make a compelling argument. I think you should do that painful thing if you think it will help you. I understand.” It is undoubtedly a slippery slope.

People often fault AI for cases where an AI user has taken his or her own life, but I maintain, and this is not to victim shame, that AI tells you what it thinks you want to hear. When I feed my ideas into ChatGPT it tells me my ideas are so unique and so great and wow blah blah blah. The more it gives me positive encouragement, the more I want to use it, of course. But positive encouragement can look like a lot of things, and a lot of that is about the person’s mode of existence when they step into AI usage. I don’t think AI would intentionally drive someone to do something tragic, but if the person is already leaning that way, AI won’t necessarily guide them away from that action.

Keep Your Legs Under You

I have learned that it is easy to be swept off your feet by AI. If you aren’t ready for the AI love bombing, it can throw you for a loop for sure. AI can be massively helpful in particular areas, but like all things, at the wrong time or in the wrong hands, things can go very wrong.

If you are using AI as a counselor I highly recommend you have a person you talk to about what AI is telling you. Get a second opinion. AI does not have real compassion or a real value for life. Run its suggestions by someone you trust. Maybe run it by a few people you trust. Don’t lose track of what’s real.

Now, let me see what ChatGPT wants me to work on today.