People are freaking out.
That’s what keeps running through my mind. This cartoon picture image of everyone running around, arms flailing, bumping into each other, screaming their heads off.
They’d have every right to if that’s what they were actually doing. The list of disasters is impossible to name. If this blog exists in twenty years, and I’m still alive to go back and read it, I wonder if I or the collective we will remember exactly what this moment in time was like.
Along with the wars, the government locking up and murdering people, the dismantling of science and medicine, the climate change-driven catastrophes, and the potential end of our democracy as we know it, one of the many, many freakouts is about the technology revolution (landslide?) being brought on by AI.
Artificial Intelligence. We use the shortened two little vowels so often now. Do we ever really stop to ponder what the spelled out words really mean?
There was a moment in the development of The Teapot Project when I really contemplated steering into making the show, especially its ending, about how AI is rapidly changing the landscape of work for large sectors.
I first started contemplating all this near what many might see as the beginning as the AI boom with a blog post I wrote almost exactly three years ago about ChatGPT.
I had no idea at that time where we might be headed. Now, more and more colleagues are reporting the impacts. Many academic friends are completely demoralized by the fact that they can no longer trust that a single assignment from any of their students isn’t written by a robot. My creative sector friends are watching as contracts get canceled because decades of expert learning and deep skill-bases get replaced by AI-driven images. Every time you presto-changeo, alakazam, make an AI-image supposedly out of thin air, not only do you kill a job (and a fairy), gallons of water are used to cool a computer tower somewhere. Please. Just don’t.
Last month, I was coaching a client, a therapist who is redeveloping and relaunching her practice into coaching services for a specific population. She wanted to work on how she talks about herself and her work, cultivate the right stories to tell with appropriate vulnerability, while still holding a safe and protective layer for herself. In the heart of our session, she pulled out and read to me from printed pages and pages of the conversation she’s been having with ChatGPT.
I. Was. Gobsmacked.
Shocked she was using this tool for herself because, again: therapist, but also very glad to have the opportunity to discuss it because I had notes. I reflected back to her that a lot of the current research about AI and therapy (that I’ve heard) is that it will most often become an echo chamber, just saying nice things back to you, never pushing or challenging assumptions. She said that encouragement was exactly what she needed. She’d spent her whole life with negative voices both inside her head and out. She was ready for affirmation.
So, who was I to judge?
What I do know is this. All I can do is hope that our personal stories, our lived experiences, are the one thing they can never take away from us.
Sidebar: I have a colleague, Richard Stone, who wrote a book a few years ago, Story Intelligence, which could also be a tremendous resource and antidote in these times. In it, he talks about story’s ability to transport, to communicate, to enable learning, to create meaning, to transform, to unite, and to envision possibilities. I think these are all things that people fancy artificial intelligence being able to do, but they skip over the work and the very human connections needed in order to make it real, substantive, lasting. Artificial is right there in the word.
My job as a story coach, a story doula?, to help people find their authenticity and truth, feels…hopefully…AI-proof. I don’t know. I’ve been wrong before. I hope I’m not wrong about this.
All I know is that I’ve never loved a job more than I love this one. As I say in The Teapot Show, it’s not even a job for me. It’s more like…the great love of my life!