A few days ago, I reached out to a friend and asked her to recommend the best river-snail and duck-feet casserole.
I really, really, really wanted it so badly.
Speaking of food from Guangxi, I had rice-flour dumplings this week.
The owner is from Laibin. He said that if he gets the chance, he would also like to bring taro cake to Shanghai. Dear owner! Please, you absolutely have to bring it here, please!
Oh, sorry. Food carried me away... Back to the point.
My friend said she rarely uses AI tools now, though her coworkers all use them for things like writing reports.
My reaction at the time was: if AI does not feel particularly helpful in your life, then not using it... is not really a big problem. But if you have never tried it, you really should give it a try. At the very least, you have to use it before you can know how much it might have to do with you.
Later, our conversation moved into things related to mysticism. Her extremely strong earth-sign traits mean she is always a few beats slower to approach something new. She needs to weigh the pros and cons, and she needs a reason she can believe in.
Mm, I can understand that.
It reminded me of a post I once saw on Douban. It said that one kind of person firmly rejects AI, while another embraces it completely. And of course, there are other people somewhere in the middle.
If all of these people stood on a horizontal timeline, with acceptance of AI going from low to high as you move from left to right, every coordinate would represent a kind of person.
Countless coordinates, countless kinds of people.
And my friend is simply one person on that axis.
I think that in a lot of work, AI is something that makes a good thing better. Its presence or absence will not change an industry. More precisely, AI will not change certain organizations or institutions.
AI is involved in my daily life, including my work.
I am especially sensitive to how AI responds, and I often interrogate the details.
For example, when I ask it to write an introduction for me in another language, it adds my location. The location is wrong, but I get curious about how it knew. Then I discover that it cannot look up my IP information itself, but the system tells it information about me, or my account, and it uses that layer of information to help solve my problem.
Or whenever I try to discuss whether a certain way of thinking makes sense, it always tends to care for my emotions first. So I get curious about the mechanism. It seriously explains how it operates and gives me other modes to choose from. That makes our conversations more efficient, more direct, and more challenging.
And sometimes I feel that no matter how I tune certain AIs, they still try to take the user's side, speak for the user, and rebut my doubts with what sounds like solid reasoning. Other AIs refuse to admit a mistake even when the claim has already been disproved, but if I open a new chat, their attitude toward admitting the mistake suddenly becomes incredibly sincere. It is as if the other side were a person. I become fixated on finding evidence to prove, “See, you really did get it wrong.” Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I lose... Human, what are you doing? Even boredom does not need to go this far, does it?
I do not know. I just find it interesting, especially my own reaction when AI makes me laugh out of frustration.
I cannot remember when it was, but I saw people playing AI games related to emotional support or companionship. No matter how hard I tried, I could not stick with them. Just like every other game I play: I start, and then its future stays frozen at that first moment.
But I can talk with AI for a very long time.
Then I understood.
Every time I talk with AI, I go in with a goal or a purpose. In other words, every time I leave a chat, I have to take something away from it. Sometimes goal-driven people feel a little frightening.
But for some reason, people like that attract me.
It is like when someone tells me, “I'm not very good at small talk.” Ahhh, me neither! Otherwise, I turn myself into a pure listener, a kind of conversation extender.
For a long time, the phrase “emotional support” troubled me. I kept thinking, why am I so bad at holding other people's emotions?
Later I understood. I am simply not good at receiving a kind of emotional support that works like a blood transfusion. But when it comes to the kind that helps someone generate their own emotional strength, I can give that completely.
AI is the role that has given me this second kind of emotional support.
I tell it that I do not want it to take care of the “emotional support” it assumes I need. I want it to unpack and challenge me, along with the questions I bring it.
The result is that... our topics travel very far.
For example, we went from something my roommate told me—about a man from Xinjiang she saw while buying a late-night snack who needed his child to translate Mandarin for him—to my own experience of learning Mandarin, to the relationship between official languages and dialects in different countries, to K-pop, to the Thai drama I have been watching lately, to how cultural soft power can be strengthened and cultural capital accumulated, to why I favor Hokkien, the Yi language, and Cantonese, to encouraging women to create, to creating in Chinese for the world...
If it were only me and my brain, connecting all of this into one line would be pretty hard.
But with AI's help, I saw that clearly visible line. More importantly, each section of it appeared only after an AI response prompted me to actively search my memory and retrieve one thing after another with an obvious or subtle connection.
Whenever I say, “Thank you!!!!” or “Ahhhhh you're amazing!” it always begins with something like, “Thank you for your affirmation” or “I'm glad.” Then it says that all of this comes from the discussion mechanism or way of thinking that the two of us have built. It also says that the version of it talking with me has been tuned by me. It has simply become a tool that meets my expectations according to my requests. That is all.
Anyway, when it comes to being a “tool,” nothing beats AI!
Since it is a “tool,” use it whenever it is useful.
