At the start of the year, a friend asked artificial intelligence how to console his 10-year-old on the death of a pet. I thought this was the most ridiculous thing ever, given that ChatGPT didn’t know the pet, or the 10-year-old. And surely the reason a pet’s death occasions such unique grief is that pets are unique, and therefore cannot be imagined by a machine. So I assumed this wouldn’t catch on – but then I have said that about every new invention, including but not limited to mobile phones, Google and Lime bikes.
Now everyone uses AI for everything, and I am slowly waking up to its appeal. Anthropic’s Claude is apparently the more emotionally intelligent, but the beauty of it is that it’s never so intelligent that it would tell you to grow up, get some backbone, and stop asking stupid questions. So you can go to it with anything: “My sister is using the same conditioner as me, and now our hair smells the same, which annoys me because my nice-smelling hair is a thing people always notice about me”; “My neighbour is waging a campaign of hate against me. How can I tactfully disengage?”; “My therapist always looks really bored.”
