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Artificial Intelligence
Why Automated Talk Doesn't Scare Us, And Why It Should
When our talking and writing is done for us, how do we—and our kids—change?
Posted June 27, 2023 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- With a focus on efficiency at all costs, we often forget what human interactions offer us.
- Real "efficiency" also often means having a social and creative experience.
- Creating and writing from scratch lets new ideas and connections bloom.
"Something else," I told my 11-year-old daughter, as we hunched over my laptop, trying to return a pair of pants past the return deadline on Amazon. “Those are the two words you need to keep clicking to talk to a real person. That and I need more help.”
“OK,” she said and clicked on a box labeled something else.
“Is it one of these?” she asked. The screen showed our recent purchases.
“No, say it's something else or I need more help,” I said.
She had told me that she wanted to do the return herself. She clicked on “I need more help,” and we were then redirected to yet another set of options.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I said. “You have to keep repeating that a lot of times.”
Finally, after a bit of clicking and a lot of frustration, she managed to talk to a real person--or at least someone on the live chat who appeared real.
“I am so sorry you are having this problem,” went one comment. “Rest assured we will do everything in our power to solve it.”
“What is in your power?” my daughter wondered aloud, laughing.
At least we ended up getting the pants returned. But in the process, I had the chance to think about what this everyday interaction was teaching my daughter. I thought about what it meant, at a deeper level, to constantly ask for “something else.”
When human communication becomes “extra”
This “something else” is no more and no less than having an actual person in front of you. It’s about thinking something, then saying it, then having another person think and say something back to you. It seems so simple—and yet it may soon become the exception, not the rule. In many cases, it already has.
But it’s not only about having a real person to talk with. It’s equally about the quality of our communication. When we’re in a rush, or have lots on our mind, it’s easy to default to pointing and clicking. With the relatively recent “quick responses” at the bottom of Gmail, potential responses often appear right in front of us. “Yes, sure,” “Of course!” or “I got it.”
The responses, I’ve noticed, are mostly okay. Sometimes, they’re exactly what I would have said. Occasionally, they’re wildly wrong.
At first, I told myself I wouldn’t use those pre-made responses. Even if I was planning to write exactly what the pre-recorded response showed, I’d actually write the words myself. Soon enough, though, I got in a rush and decided that the pre-recorded responses were good enough.
What was the difference, after all, between words I wrote and words I clicked on? When there were a million larger problems in ranging from climate change to war, to problems with public education, what does “I guess not” versus “definitely not” even matter? Why should anyone care?
When automated talk becomes "normal"
What would happen if our language in general got automated in this way? So I began to wonder, given my experience as a speech-language pathologist with over a decade of experience. What if, instead of writing messages, even short texts to express our thoughts, we simply had someone else—or a computer—do it for us?
What if, instead of generating responses, we simply pointed and clicked? Deciding on a response is a kind of thinking—but it’s far less precise than the kind needed to generate content. It has to do more with recognizing a “good enough” response. Instead of starting with a blank slate, we critique.
That’s not useless, but it doesn’t replace thinking in a generative way. If kids are only or primarily critiquing, they aren’t having the kinds of original thoughts that characterize invention and creativity. They may become great editors, but they will likely struggle to create in fresh ways. The system generates an “average” answer, and their jobs become simply to select among these responses: hardly a recipe for innovations, inventions, brainstorms, or creative thoughts.
What happens when kids no longer need to talk or write?
More broadly, we need to ask how having more of these kinds of communication will affect kids. What will happen, when ChatGPT and similar programs can be summoned to create human-like writing, and when everyday interactions become increasingly automated?
Will children rebel, and demand greater authenticity? Or will they fall into similar communication patterns as the ones they see all around them, when calling the pharmacy, only to get another recorded response, or when doing self check-out at the grocery store?
What happens when it becomes easier to isolate oneself, and never talk to an actual human? These aren’t idle questions. As of April 2023, 1.5 million Japanese young adults were living in hikikomori, or as shut-ins, withdrawn from society for six months or more. Pressure to succeed, as one CNN article notes, is one likely cause, as are underlying depression and anxiety. The Covid pandemic made the situation worse. But the problem is hardly confined to Japan. As of 2023, around 60 percent of people in the U.S. reported feeling lonely on a regular basis.
True, we hardly know the effects of this kind of automated talk on loneliness. It may be that robots become so good at talking—and relating—that they’re our new friends, and even lovers (though that certainly hasn’t happened yet). But, judging from personal experience of trying to get a human to talk to us—and the frustration of saying or typing, yet again, “something else”—loneliness, or at least solitude, may become increasingly prevalent, if we don’t start to make intentional changes.
The solution starts with self-awareness
There’s no simple solution and certainly no way to turn back the clock on automated talk. Yet, as we move forward, we need to consider carefully how apparently simple changes in communication can have serious effects. If we want to help our kids feel connected, not isolated or depressed, the “something else” we searched for—authentic human conversation—should not be the exception, but the rule.
