Is AI the latest frontier of convenience culture?

What ChatGPT has to say about itself

I recently moved Heaven and Earth to attend a multi-day conference. Although it was virtual, I wanted to have the entire time to be truly present. This is no small feat in my home, and I called in every favor under the sun to make it happen. The first night, Grandpa took my oldest to gymnastics with my toddler in tow and a teenage baby-sitter (bless her!) hung out with my screaming, bottle-rejecting 8 month old for a few hours. As soon as I signed off for the night, everyone was ready for their bedtime routine: shower, snack, story, snuggles, sleep (or lack thereof). The next day, my husband pulled triple-duty with the kiddos and I consumed roughly 36 ounces of coffee and stared at a computer screen for 13 hours. It was a wonderful experience and one I would do again in a heartbeat (but perhaps with a little less caffeine…).

When I finally came up for air at the end of the conference, I looked around to find happy (but clingy) kids and a disaster of a house. Because I hadn’t pre-planned meals, the kids had eaten “snacky dinners” (their favorite, tbh— hard to beat cottage cheese and cashews!) and Chick-Fil-A. The dishwasher hadn’t been unloaded in two days, the laundry desperately needed run, and there was a sticky goop that I’ve finally decided was dried avocado covering the floor under the baby’s high chair.

Of course, this could be a conversation about division of labor or how we expect women to ‘do it all.’ But for some reason, what this really made me think about was the promises of technology. Women get washing machines and dishwashers— imagine all the free time!— only to begin washing clothes more frequently, not less.

We get cars that allow us to embark on cross-country road trips, but we no longer live close enough to walk to the playground or corner store. The time that was spent with family, neighbors, or sleeping is now spent commuting.

E-mail promises to be more efficient than snail mail, and there’s no doubt it is. But as I anxiously await an e-mail that may be months away, or may never come at all, I feel my heart race and my hands tense every time I refresh the page. I spend easily more time wading through spam messages than I will ever spend responding to the hypothetical e-mail I’m so anxiously looking for.

We get cell phones and text messages that are supposed to connect us to people far away. And it does, sure. I can send a meme to my sibling across the country with no regard for time zones or daily rhythms, and trust that they’ll see it eventually. But how many times have you answered a text with a casual “oh I’m good!” because it’s too much effort to type out paragraphs with the funny thing your little one said, the anxiety you feel about a work project, or or the highlights of your last vacation? I know I have. Here, ease of access degrades the quality of the relationship.

It’s not that any of these are bad. My home very happily functions with its modern mechanical contraptions— we even have a robot vacuum! My takeaway is just that these promises of technology aren’t always what they were cracked up to be.

Artificial intelligence is, of course, the latest technology that’s come to save us. I used ChatGPT for the first time a few weeks ago. I reasoned that if artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, I should at least try it out before I complain too loudly. For the record, I don’t think you have to try everything to have an opinion about it— I’ll maintain that ‘drugs are bad’ without trying them, for example— but it felt like a useful exercise to understand more. Spoiler alert: I generally found conversing with it to be as discombobulating as the AI-generated answers that show up at the top of Google search results. (I’ve heard you can curse in Google queries to prevent AI from responding; given that I don’t use that language in real life, though, I’m not sure that I want it all over my search history).

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I tried out a few things. First, can AI find the book that cited an obscure primary source from the 17th century? It gave me an answer, but it wasn’t the correct one. Can AI generate a list of top vacation spots? Sure (but it put Maui near the top of the list, even though that’s a tricky one with wildfire recovery). Can it tell me the average grocery budget for a family of 5? Yes, but with an incredibly condescending note that the cost will vary “based on factors like location, dietary preferences, and how much you cook at home.” No duh.

Of course, I realize the artificial intelligence is just amassing all the data points that we humans are giving it. In most cases, I found the same exact answer ChatGPT gave me within the top 5 Google search results.

But then I considered what artificial intelligence was serving as a substitute for. In some cases— like when a student asks ChatGPT for answers to their homework assignment— artificial intelligence is substituting for your own content mastery. If I ask a computer system to tell me a vacation spot or diagnose my kid based on a rash and a cough, ChatGPT is substituting for the expert advice of a travel agent or medical professional.

In education, AI has been a particular problem. Not only are students turning in AI-generated work, but teachers are giving AI-generated feedback. I can sympathize with the work loads that lead professors and teachers to turn to chatbots— but in my time in the classroom, I would have been devastated to find out that I had provided grueling line edits to a student’s AI-generated paper. I can only imagine that a student would feel the same about AI-generated feedback. It’s worth noting that AI is amplifying a problem that already exists; high school student William Liang recently opined that “If an AI can do an assignment in five seconds, it was probably never a good assignment in the first place.” But something is lost when we choose the end result— the finished worksheet, the 4.0 GPA, the newspaper article— over the process.

In other cases, ChatGPT is substituting for the conversations one might have with a friend or experienced mentor. Those are perhaps the most troubling conversations to have with artificial intelligence. There are any number of horror stories, including artificial intelligence telling people to die (and character-based AI is responsible for at least one suicide). But even if we don’t take it to the extreme, turning to Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT for assistance is turning away from real life support. If you ask AI to edit your paper, you’re losing valuable feedback that a real-life peer or mentor could give you. If you chat with Claude after a long day, you lose the connection you might find with a roommate or partner.

It feels, to me, like AI is the latest foray into convenience culture. I’ve written (and spoken) before about what is lost in convenience culture, including feeling distanced from the behaviors that help us feel grounded in our own lives. How do we get a sense of accomplishment out of turning in an AI-generated assignment? AI Claude might be more than happy to talk, but he won’t ever care about you as a person. He might be “built to simulate the behavior of care” like “listening closely” and “responding thoughtfully” (except, of course, when it isn’t thoughtful at all)— but AI isn’t the one who knows how you like your morning coffee or the inside jokes that make you laugh.

I went ahead and asked AI how it felt about replacing real life connections.

Accessible 24/7? Sure, but I have to say that this flies in the face of the wisdom that (almost) everything gets better with a little bit of sleep.

Then, I straight up asked it how it felt about its participation in convenience culture.

I think— if AI managed to be remotely accurate— ChatGPT would be somewhat correct that it can “lower barriers” to finding information. But I’m troubled by the idea that “if people start outsourcing too much cognitive effort, it might affect how deeply they understand or engage with the world.” Oof.

I think we all want to deeply engage with the world. Apparently, the most commonly asked question to ChatGPT is “What is the meaning of life?” Perhaps it’s asked in jest, but why are we asking a computer system to talk to us about the thrill of achieving something we’ve worked for, the peace we find among the trees, the joy we feel hearing our child’s giggles, or the gut-punch we experience if the doctor gives life-altering news? What would ever make us think that a computer system could tell us the meaning of life?

I’m not going to pretend that I know the meaning of life. But I know that the answer won’t be found behind a computer screen, especially one that intentionally manipulates its users. I had my fun with AI— I found it pretty creepy (not to mention incredibly environmentally destructive). But I’d rather not enable yet another tool that prioritizes convenience over connection.

*Particular thanks to my dear friend who texted me after this published asking if every reference to “ChatGDP” was a clever reference to impending economic destruction from AI— it was not! Just me writing-while-sleep-deprived. It’s since been corrected to its correct name, ChatGPT.