AI is saying, "Come Play with Me"

Can you hear it? How will you answer the call?

I created this image with app.leonardo.ai

Let’s return to the age of eight. A neighbor has moved in next door, and they have a kid the same age. In fact, this kid attends your elementary school, though you barely know them. It’s exciting to have someone so close; but you’ve heard horrible things. In fact, the predictions are dire. So, when they ask you to come over, what will you say? Will you take a chance on a playdate or shut the door?

While this analogy to ChatGPT is shaky at best, what I’m pointing to, however simply, is the importance of direct experience. The harms, both potential and real, that come with AI, concern me too. That’s why I’m starting a Humane Tech meetup, building an AI startup, running webinars and workshops.

Yet direct experience is how we learn. Of the millions who have tried ChatGPT, the majority did so just once. Last year, I heard a Zen Roshi deride the chatbot’s inabilty to write a haiku. She was on stage; I was in the audience. But I wanted to tell her:

• Responses are iterative. This is categorically different from our interaction with software, which “just works” (or it doesn’t and we give up).

  • If you’re not getting a good response, ask yourself

    • what’s the quality of the data I’m working with?

    • what’s the quality of the question I’m asking?

• When we interact with technology, we have a historical lack of agency, and we bring this, knowingly or not, into the interaction itself.

  • Part of the work is to discern,

    • is this a limitation of the technology?

    • or a limitation I’ve imposed on myself?

I also wanted to give the Roshi this prompt I’d created to write a haiku:

Write a haiku from this content. A haiku is a three-line poem. The first line is five syllables. The second line is seven syllables. The third line is five syllables. A syllable is a unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word; e.g., there are two syllables in water and three in inferno. No rhyming. Haikus typically pass spaces of deep wisdom and mystery. Here's a famous one from Basho, a Japanese poet who brought reverence to the haiku form: spring leaving—/ birds cry,/ fishes’ eyes fill with tears

Now, that’s a mouthful of a prompt for someone playing with ChatGPT for the first time. It’s what’s known as “one-shot learning” — showing the AI what to produce, just as you might with someone learning haikus for the first time. I ran this prompt on the talks from the conference in question, Wisdom 2.0 & AI, and got this:

Ancient wisdom calls,

Machines echo human hearts,

Empathy in code.

While there’s no substitute for writing a haiku yourself, I see this as something different: co-creation. Together, you play, unhindered by outcome. If you do it well, you’ll hear the gasp of knowing, the shock of surprise.

So, how else can we play? It all depends on what play means to you, but here’s a few places to start:

• Doodle with Google’s Quick Draw.

  • You’ll have 20 seconds for Google to guess your drawing

  • It’s like solo Pictionary, but with a robot voice

• Translate videos: translate.video

• Learn a new language: langotalk.org

• Find movies that say a specific phrase: playphrase.me

• Create Al characters for video games:

  • convai.com

  • inworld.ai

• Learning design tools:

  • to-teach.ai

  • minicoursegenerator.com

• Create a customized learning plan for anything you want to learn: Wisdomplan.ai

• Create Al images

  • app.leonardo.ai

  • lexica.art

  • firefly.adobe.com

  • Midjourney.com

Credit for assembling these tools goes to Jenny Wright at Singularity University. Everything on this list has a free version, except perhaps Midjourney.

Wait, But Why?

We all have the same number of hours in a day — why should you spend yours with a conversational chatbot? What’s to be gained when you do? Or lost when you don’t?

Let’s start with the latter:

• If you don’t engage, you simply don’t know. Your senses haven’t taken in the experience of co-creation with a LLM. All you have are others’ opinions.

  • Doing it once doesn’t count. Give yourself a project. Make it a habit. Timebox it. Talk to others. Learn online. Meet your goal.

• We’re in the midst of the biggest explosion in technology since we learned to tame fire. Do you want to sit this one out?

• If fear is a motivator, consider this: “AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI is going to take your job.” - Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

Now for some of the gains:

• AI can bring joy, play and ease to your life.

  • How often do you tell personalized bedtime stories to your kids, on the spot, with all the travails of their choosing?

  • AI can translate things not written in a way you understand, including

    • legalese

    • security speak

    • code

    • medical speak

  • AI can help you navigate difficult decisions by weighing all the options

• AI can make your work more satisfying. You never have to not know something. For almost anything you do online, now you never have to go it alone.

• You can teach others what you’ve learned about AI so they can apply it, too.

Most of all, there’s a real joy in agency and enagement. You go from being a passive observer to a participant. And as a participant, you have a whole world to shape and explore.

So, let’s explore, share, and learn — together.