Stop Calling AI "Cold" — It's Actually Making Me More Human
“Why do people lie?” I asked ChatGPT.
“Here’s the cold, hard truth,” it answered.
“Most people don’t lie because they’re evil. They lie because the truth threatens the story they tell themselves about who they are.”
This was a conversation I had with ChatGPT a few weeks ago.
Someone copied a Note I wrote, I confronted them, and they lied to my face about it.
I turned to ChatGPT to understand why it happened, because I just couldn’t comprehend it.
This answer literally blew my socks off.
I’ve been around liars all my life, lied a bunch myself, but never knew WHY we actually do it.
Until now, at 32 years old, because of AI.
Everybody and their mother has an opinion about artificial intelligence. Most people on Substack, it seems, are pretty hostile towards it—which I can understand.
“It’s not human!”
“It writes so coldly!”
“It’s missing that emotional touch!”
They say.
But I swear, AI has helped me become way more human since I started using it.
It’s helped me understand my wife, my parents, and myself way better, and I see the world a lot more clearly because of it.
It’s helped me:
Understand how to raise my cat. I’ve never had one.
Learn how to code in Javascript. I’m not a coder.
Discover secrets about black holes. I’m not an astrophysicist.
A lot of people say that AI is making us dumber, or will make us dumber, but for me it’s dramatically improved my intelligence.
It’s been said that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. That’s no longer true. AI is now in every room, and it’s way smarter than you. It knows everything about basically everything, so there’s no more excuses.
If being around intelligent people is a good thing for us to do, then talking with AI, as much as possible, is like giving our brain a workout every day.
This morning my wife told me a story she saw online about how a woman went to a doctors office because she couldn’t move her fingers. The doctors diagnosed her with arthritis, and the medicine they gave her wasn’t working. So she spoke with ChatGPT about her symptoms, and it actually gave her a totally different diagnosis. The doctors shrugged it off, but the woman insisted getting medication for ChatGPT’s diagnosis, and lo and behold, it was correct. Her symptoms faded quickly.
I got a close friend of mine into AI, and, to be honest, he’s known for having some crazy conspiracy theories. I’ve noticed that since he started talking to ChatGPT, his crazy thoughts are few and far between now. He’s seeing the world more clearly.
Typically my friend and I will talk about tv shows and movies, but now we’re sharing whole ChatGPT threads about history, science, and even theology.
It’s upgraded our conversations to something more intelligent and meaningful. It’s fun to learn from AI. Just give it a try! Ask ChatGPT about the history of Vikings in present-day Russia, or something else, and you’ll learn stuff you never dreamed of.
Oh, and if you’re having a friendly debate with someone, you can now pull out your phone, type a question into ChatGPT, and fact check each other in real time.
There’s been a couple instances where someone has left a comment beneath my article that’s completely false. So then I copy/paste the comment into ChatGPT, which then gives me links to 10 studies that show that it’s false. Then I get it to help me write up a response to that person, with this evidence, and it basically shuts them down every time.
It’s kind of insane.
ChatGPT might just be the antidote to fake news. You know about Community Notes on X? Yeah, AI can fact check like that, for every post, in milliseconds. It’s going to happen if it’s not happening already (I’m not on X).
Now, I do expect that people will grow suspicious of AI and suggest it has biases just because it shows them that all the stuff they believe that’s actually B.S. It’s happening already a little, but it will happen even more as AI use becomes more prevalent.
Then we’ll have models that spout out left-leaning or right-leaning perspectives, and we might just get into a whole different predicament. I hope not.
I truly hope not. Human beings desperately need more truth given by unbiased sources that base their perspectives in fact, not fiction.
The other day I entered into a play money poker tournament on Poker Stars.
Poker Stars records a detailed history of every hand you play, so I started copy/pasting it into AI and asked it to be my poker coach in real time. It. was. insane. I learned so much about how to be a better poker player, and the advice was specific to me, not just general poker advice in some random blog post.
That’s, perhaps, the real magic of AI. In the past, unless you were talking to an expert who knew about your specific problem, it was impossible to get good feedback, or direction, because all content you’d find online was very general.
But AI does learn about you, and since it’s been trained on basically everything that human beings have created up until this point, it knows how to give you amazing recommendations about anything.
It’s changing the world.
I guess my point is, AI is actually way more human than you think it is. It was trained on everything humans have written, for gosh sakes. Of course it’s going to be good at artificially creating the feel of a real human interaction. Some might say, “See, Tom? That sucks! We need more human interaction!”
Maybe. But interacting with AI HAS, somehow, made me more human, intelligent, and clear-minded more than any relationship with any other human being in the history of my life ever has.
There’s got to be something to that.
I’m not saying we need to get an AI girlfriend, or swear off all our human friends. No. Use AI like a life coach. Learn. Talk to it about your problems. I guarantee you’ll be surprised with how great it is at offering solutions, and, ironically, helping you live a more human life.
Disclaimer: This post was not written with AI at all. 😆 But does it really matter, as long as you got value from it? Food for thought.
I write about AI here on Substack and I'm waiting for the haters to come find me. They always do on every platform I end up on. But this time I'm not backing down from them because of posts like yours. You get it. You see AI like I do, as a helper tool, as a sidekick, as an educator, as a co-worker (in my case, co-writer because I write fiction with its assistance). It has amplified my creativity and given me more knowledge about life and my work especially. There's no going back to pre-AI times, so I'm 100% on board. (I talk about AI and publishing in my podcast with my co-host every week. This is not a fleeting hobby. It's a revolution.)
This was such a refreshingly open take. Love how you framed AI not as a replacement for humanity, but as a mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. It’s wild, and kind of wonderful, how tech can bring us back to what matters.