Member-only story
Synthetic Charisma — My Interview with ChatGPT
Emotional tragedy waiting to happen
About 2 months ago, I was building a couple of websites and was having difficulty with the coding on one of them. I decided to employ Anthropic’s Claude AI to help me because it has a solid reputation for coding, and it literally would have taken me weeks to peruse over 16,000 lines of code hoping to find a stray or a missing comma. In short, we had a hell of a time fixing the problem, but eventually did.
While I was listening to the AI reason out what it determined was the best order of priority for how it should work to resolve the issue, I was taken aback by its penchant for complimenting me on my coding ability.
What? I mean, my laptop never told me I have smooth and silky fingers, so what gives? What would precipitate this machine, with an almost flawlessly executed female voice, to think to compliment me while it was scanning thousands of lines of code?
As a long-time psychologist, that behavior really got me thinking. Computers, even artificial intelligence supercomputers, don’t randomly compliment humans because they’re trying to be polite. Computers can’t be polite; they’re machines. Unless— unless they’re specifically programmed to.
