My wife is a therapist, so the story Can AI therapists do better than the real thing? (oh hello, Betteridge’s law of headlines) piqued my interest, since we’ve had lots of conversations about this kind of thing.

The story starts off with some really interesting anecdotes about people forming “relationships” with their therapy chatbots, but it then turns towards some of the concerns and drawbacks, and how one client (not a fan of the use of “patient” in the article) ultimately dealt with the bot they created.

One example of the things that AI therapy bots can’t replace:

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship—one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications—the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,” Grosz says.

Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a replacement. I really think that there’s a human in the loop going forward in that AI might be a useful tool, but we all know its limits in terms of hallucinations, in terms of potential inaccuracies. Even if you apply it to rote tasks, it’s important to check the work. And you know better than anyone as a writer that the current models do not match your ability to write, let alone gain context in a conversation to ask the right questions or show the intelligence that you have as a journalist.

If you think about what it takes to create great design, there’s so much in that context window that’s emotional or thinking temporally about a brand experience or a user flow. I just don’t see how, in the near term, AI is able to have that as part of its context, which means that humans are providing that.

I’ve always said that when I grow up I want to write like Paul Ford. Well, I’m all grown up now. I still don’t write like Paul Ford, and he still writes absolute gems like To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare—in my opinion the final word on the value of the humanities:

A programmer sneers at the white space in Python, a sociologist rolls their eyes at a geographer, a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory. They, we, are patrolling the borders, deciding what belongs inside, what does not. And this same battle of the disciplines, everlasting, ongoing, eternal, and exhausting, defines the internet. Is blogging journalism? Is fan fiction “real” writing? Can video games be art? (The answer is always: Of course, but not always. No one cares for that answer.)

I’ve definitely seen this too! How ✨ became the unofficial AI emoji:

In the relatively short history of emoji, sparkles have been used to express excitement and magic, said Jane Solomon, the senior emoji lexicographer at the emoji reference site Emojipedia. Branding new AI products with the ✨ emoji suggests that these tools are exciting and magical, which might encourage more people to test out the technology. “It can seem like magic if you don’t understand how it works,” Solomon said.

This is a bleak take, but I have to admit that I am also concerned.

I believe we have some personal agency. I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the first generation to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us before we had any sense of who we were.

Ed Zitron’s newsletter is kind of a hate-read for me because his vitriol knows no end and it can be a lot… but I think he did pretty well in his response to Marc Andreessen’s latest essay:

This is Andreessen’s dream—a continual race to the bottom where the tech industry is incentivized not to solve problems, but to find ways to make already-solved problems cheaper to solve so that venture capitalists can make money.

That’s a good quote, but please don’t stop there. The whole essay is the best rebuttal I’ve seen so far.

This is a thoughtful, well-argued essay by Benedict Evans about where we’re at with LLMs.

Whenever we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit our existing ways of working, and then over time we change the work to fit the new tool. We try to treat ChatGPT as though it was Google or a database instead of asking what it is useful for. How can we change the work to take advantage of this?

Since I prefer reading over watching, I appreciate Dave Rupert’s summary of this video about AI/LLM responsibility in his post Uncovering a new class of responsibilities:

Three rules of technology outline their nearly hour long talk:

1. When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities
2. If that tech confers power, it starts a race
3. If you do not coordinate, the race ends in tragedy

It’s those last steps that are the concerning ones. If we fail to respond to #1, we end up with #3.