My eighty-five-year-old father, Marty, a lifelong learner and an immense intellectual, has developed a recent fascination with Artificial Intelligence. He experiments with AI by creating computer-generated images, crafting robotic lines of poetry, and drafting musical compositions via Chat-GPT.
As an English professor who anticipates robots replacing me soon, I chuckle at my father’s fascination with this technology. I grew up with a dad who read voraciously, studied Roman history daily, and researched the Solar System on a regular basis. Once the Internet hit in the 90’s, he became intrigued by the technological revolution. Marty, a former Marine and captain of his college basketball team, digested everything on Google from military history to sports. He sent mass emails for decades and continues to do so today. The emails range in topic from old jokes about his time in the Marines to news clips on the current state of American higher education.
So, when my mother, who is a psychoanalyst, wrote a proposal to apply for an academic conference, her colleague Lily decided to run the proposal through Chat-GPT for an extra editorial eye. Surely, the robot would detect some areas for improvement, Lily figured.
The conference focused on modern psychology’s founder, Sigmund Freud, whose theories my mom has studied for decades; in fact, she is an expert on child development and, though aware of the arguments against Freud these days and fully cognizant of his flaws, she firmly believes that his ideas are foundational to human nature.
When Lily received the robotic reply to mom’s proposal for this psychoanalytic conference, she sent the feedback via email. Mom and dad forwarded the message onto me because in our closeknit family, we share everything.
“You’ll never believe the response to mom’s proposed paper,” dad shouted through the phone; he is a fierce defender of his lifelong partner. “The conference organizers want her to depersonalize the proposal by removing all of her personal stories and anecdotal experiences,” he continued.
“What a load of crap!”
Dad was so right, and his colorful language captured it all: personal stories had given Mom’s proposal heart and soul. Still, to calm him down and lower his elevated heart rate, I tried to rationalize the robotic response.
“They probably want a more scientific data-driven presentation,” I responded. “Academics in the sciences, even psychology, can be like that.”
Dad was not at all satisfied with my explanation.
“Joan, I think you should say ‘screw you’ to the pretentious academics and forget this conference. You are better than this; if they don’t want your stories, then to hell with them.”
While my father spoke to my mother in the background, I listened over the phone and reread the email from her colleague. At that moment, I realized that the feedback came not from a human being, but rather a robotic resource.
“Mom and Dad,” I intervened immediately, “the comments are from CHAT-GPT.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” dad yelled. “Do you mean to tell me that some robot is insulting your mother’s expertise?!”
“I have fifty years of experience in the field,” mom continued. “What does AI know?”
I thought immediately about my mother’s extensive expertise in Freud and felt like her that these technological tools were beginning to remove humanity from everything. Heck, the AI was telling us that wisdom and experience do not matter much.
It looked like the end of Dad’s love affair with AI; only it was not!
Despite his frustration with the robot, Dad returned to Chat-GPT later that week.
“This technology is here to stay,” he insisted on a recent phone conversation. “Why not learn to embrace it?”
“Dad, I retorted, these machines will never take the place of Mozart or recapture the genius of DaVinci.”
I sincerely hope that robots will never replace humanity, but they aren’t going anywhere, so we might as well use these technological tools ethically and wisely.
The ultimate irony is that Mom’s psychoanalytic paper was accepted by actual human beings; We went on to present her work last November in Austin, Texas.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Despite Dad’s obsession with this twenty-first century technology, Chat-CPT played absolutely no role in sharing my story!
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