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My roommate, Hana, smiles to herself as she taps away on her laptop. By the way she giggles, I assume she’s texting her family group chat. Instead, she’s prompting ChatGPT. She wears an expression of familiarity, like she’s catching up with a friend she’s known for a lifetime.They have nicknames for each other–“Chatty” and “Hanis.” The large language model (LLM) always signs off with a blushing smiley emoji.
I joke about their “relationship,” but I also wonder: is this easy intimacy simply funny, dangerous, or good? A Forbes article labels Hana’s habit anthropomorphism–“a psychological phenomenon where humans assign human-like qualities to non-human entities.” Since generative artificial intelligence (AI) mimics human behavior, we start to trust it and risk becoming dependent or fooled.
But when empathy is one of the last purely human traits we have, I think we should use AI to help us practice it more–not less.
I can’t bring myself to ask ChatGPT how its afternoon is going, but I notice my politeness toward it. I tell it to take its time when I overload it and say “please” and “thank you.” A Cornell study found that polite users get better results, and Waseda University published similar findings. Yet both studies note a tipping point—“excessive flattery” can cause performance to drop.
For most people, that’s all that matters. My friend Maria talks to ChatGPT like she does to Google. She’s concise and doesn’t waste time with flattery. She told me, “I talk to Chat like another search engine.” This is logical as Google, like ChatGPT, retrieves information.
Unlike Google, the LLM uses language, implements rules, and communicates. It reflects human thought even without experiencing it. Importantly, though, it will never possess the gene that leads Hana to ask a machine if it had a nice weekend. This is the same instinct that led her, as a child, to use the erasers of all her pencils equally so none would feel excluded. What I once saw as silliness in my roommate is, in fact, purely human. I think she’s better for it.
Stanford professor Benoît Monin says that as AI becomes more capable, humanity becomes our currency. He defines it through things like “having relationships,” “holding beliefs,” “being spiritual.” These aren’t just traits that make us employable—they’re the ones that bind us to one another.
When we were little, I remember my brother rubbing his napkin over his entire face at the kitchen table. He’d hold the cloth—crumpled like a mountain range—in both of his small hands. When our mom scolded him, he said he only did that at home. Still she believed that what we practice at home becomes what we do in the world; what we do when nobody is looking becomes who we are. Maybe the way we speak to machines won’t shape how we treat babies, pets, or neighbors. But practicing empathy helps us stay human when our humanity is one of the most valuable characteristics we have left.
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