Freedom from decision fatigue
In seconds, the AI took care of decisions that I would normally have to worry about, like making travel arrangements or canceling dinner plans because my mother-in-law wanted to visit.
And I made good decisions, like advising me to be nice to my mother-in-law and accept her offer to cook for us.
I’ve been wanting to repaint my home office for over a year, but couldn’t choose a color, so I provided a photo of the room to a chatbot and an AI remodeling app. “Taupe” was the top suggestion, followed by sage and terracotta.
Faced with every possible shade of sage in the paint section of Lowe’s, I took a photo, asked ChatGPT to pick it out, and purchased five different samples.
I drew each stripe on the wall and took a selfie so I could analyze it on ChatGPT. After all, this will be my Zoom background. The company chose the appealing name “Secluded Woods,” which they found in a paint hallucination that was actually called Brisket Olive. (Generative AI systems can produce inaccuracies that the tech industry considers “hallucinations.”)
I was relieved that I didn’t choose the most boring shade, but when I shared this story with Jang from OpenAI, she seemed a little horrified. She compared my consulting with her company’s software to asking a “stranger on the street.”
She offered some advice for interacting with Spark. “I’m going to treat it as a second opinion,” she said. “Then ask why. Give a good reason and see if you agree with it.”
(I consulted with my husband and chose the same color.)
While we were happy with the new look of our office, what really made us happy was that we were finally making a change. This was one of the best parts of this week, a break from decision paralysis.
Just as we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to mapping apps and our ability to recall facts to search engines, this explosion of AI assistants means we’ll be handing over even more decisions to machines. It might turn out like this.
Judith Donas, a faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center who studies the relationship between technology and humans, said constant decision-making can be “shackling.” But she didn’t think that even with all the world’s wisdom inside a chatbot, using AI could be much better than flipping a coin or rolling dice. .
“I have no idea what the source is,” she said. “At some point, there was a human source of ideas there, but it became a friend.”
All of the AI tools I used contained information from human authors whose works were collected without their consent. (As a result, the tool’s creators have been the subject of lawsuits, including one brought by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.)
There are also outsiders who try to manipulate the system’s answers. Search optimization experts who have developed sneaky techniques to appear higher in Google rankings are trying to influence what chatbots say. And research shows it’s possible.
Donnas wonders if we become so reliant on these systems that we forget that there are profit-seeking organizations behind them, especially when they interact vocally in the same way we do. I’m concerned.
“It’s starting to replace the need to have friends,” she said. “I wish I had a little companion who was always by my side, who always answered me, who never said the wrong thing, who was always on my side.”
