Can you describe what you want? That seems to be a pretty simple question, doesn’t it? When we communicate with others we have to be able to describe to them what it is we want from life, what our intentions are, what our dreams and goals are, what we want from the relationships we are in, what we need from businesses we frequent, the kinds of services we need from them and the list goes on.
This is the basic connection we have with people. We have to be able to communicate clearly. And even though clear communication is a must between various parties in life, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes we don’t hear correctly. Sometimes those speaking don’t communicate clearly. Sometimes we don’t really say what we want to say and sometimes we overstep our bounds and are too pushy with our communications.
So, what if we could learn to communicate better? This may come as a surprise to you, but I think the entire buzz around chatGPT, Midjourney and all the other AI chat and art generators are going to make us, actually force us to do just that, communicate better. Because of these new AI systems so prevalent today, we will be forced to figure out how to ask them for exactly what we want.
A lot of communication between people is frivolous. We have all been at a party or gathering where there’s that one individual who won’t stop talking. They manage to talk about every subject under the sun and it is all you can do to just avoid them for the rest of the evening. And maybe we have all done this too, just possibly said too much and watched as someone’s eyes glass over because our talking is just too intense.
In the world of AI and telling these systems what we want from them, you have to be precise and not over do it. We cannot be that person at the party who talks too much. We have to learn how these systems go about understanding communications and we are then forced to tell them what we want without all the frivolous nonsense. And what it really takes from us, is realizing, “What do I actually want?”
I was working with my friend Christine Smith over at Christine’s Philosophy On Tourism the other day and we were trying to come up with a photo in Midjourney for an article she was working on related to fragrance free accommodations related to short term rentals. And the challenge we were having was in trying to describe to this AI art program what exactly it was we wanted. And some of the challenge was in Midjourney not understanding what we wanted, due to its own limitations.
This understanding on Midjourney’s part will eventually get better as it learns how humans communicate and as its programmers continue to modify and update its code. However, the challenge is still there for us humans as we start to interface with machines like we have never done so before.
We will begin to see for ourselves just what kind of communicators we really are. AI programs will, and already do, take what we say extremely literally. And that will make us start to think, since this machine is taking everything I say literally, then what do I actually mean? What am I really trying to communicate? What do I really want from it?
So what is the bottom line here? While some people are freaking out about the rise of intelligent machines, and there is certainly room for concern, I think as we get used to communicating with these programs, it will make us better communicators with each other. And isn’t that the challenge in so much of what we do? How much better would our friendships and business interactions and relationships be if we could just tell our friends, business associates and romantic partners what we really mean and what we really want?
As we train AI systems to better understand us, they in turn are training us to be more precise about how we communicate with them. And overall, that is a good thing. Crucial conversations are what makes a difference in the world and if we as humans can learn how to do that better, no telling of the true impact on society.
Don’t freak out about AI, not just yet. As we learn to communicate with machines and come to terms with how all of this works, we may just learn some things about ourselves.