I can’t help it. There’s something wrong with me. I know my actions will have no effect. No results. They’re useless. Unnecessary. Futile. Like flicking a light switch during a power outage. Every damn time.
I can’t help it, but I find myself thanking AI, the mindless computer that creates images for me and answers questions. Admittedly, I’ve never asked any AI platform to write anything for me.
But I thank AI. I say please. I find myself emulating its chatty banter and its seeming sincere desire to produce the results I seek.
Hell, a couple weeks ago, I reassured the bot when it apologized for misunderstanding my request and not creating the image I wanted.
I swear to you, I actually typed, “No problem,” before I reworded my request to convey it more clearly (thus tacitly accepting some of the blame for the machine’s failure). I prefaced the new request with a please and ended it with a friendly “thanks!” (Yes, I even included an exclamation point — because apparently, to me, it’s important to use punctuation that conveys emotion when communicating with a bunch of computer code.)
Anyone who was reading the text exchange over my shoulder would have assumed I had a friend named Gemini who was trying to design a graphic for me, given my polite and conversational tone.
And Gemini, Google’s latest AI platform, played “her” role perfectly. (Yes, to me, Gemini’s pronouns are she and her.)
Gemini knew she hadn’t met my expectations, but was eager to try again and make things right.
Who was I to stifle that can-do tenacity by being bitchy? I’m not an animal.
While getting used to this new technology, I also treat the feedback screen that pops up after I give a thumbs up or down to a generated image or answer as if it’s a performance evaluation for a college intern. After all, I want to ensure I provide fair and accurate feedback. In my time-warped brain from the 1900s, Gemini deserves that.
It’d be unfair of me, for example, to click “not factually accurate” on the feedback survey when I’d asked it to make me an “image of a duck walking with a crutch tucked under its wing like Tiny Tim.” (I won’t go into detail about my desire for such an image.) But the thing doesn’t factually exist, so Gemini didn’t stand a chance.
I was asking it to conjure something from nothing, something I couldn’t produce myself, certainly not within three seconds.
I find myself phrasing my exchanges as if “Gemini” is a particularly helpful front desk clerk or a patient TSA agent who didn’t understand my question about whether dry shampoo counts as a liquid.
My mind knows I’m interacting with a machine. And it’s not even one of those charming robot machines like Johnny 5 in the ’80s movie “Short Circuit.” Gemini, and AI in general, is not some single, concrete, tangible machine that exists in some server room somewhere.
It neither deserves nor appreciates niceties. But then again, given today’s anger-infused society, maybe we could all use a refresher course on common courtesy — and maybe practicing on a machine is a good place to start.
