The Real Appeal of AI Isn't Intelligence. It's Feeling Understood.

Much has been written about how artificial intelligence expands what we can know. Less attention has been paid to what it offers emotionally: the rare pleasure of being known.

The world is now aware that GPT rapidly accelerates learning. And the more you know in advance, the more you’re able to appreciate it. Like scholars in many other fields, I’m astonished on the daily by the scope, accuracy, and creativity it brings to complex sources in my field.

Prompt: “Compare and contrast the philosophers Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor on the role of religion in late modernity.” In seconds GPT will analyze and put in dialogue these two intellectual giants—a task that took me many months of painstaking reading and note-taking in grad school. It’s fascinating, humbling—and a bit irritating.

Yet for all this prodigious new understanding, as I watch myself using this tool I’m beginning to sense that what draws me most powerfully to it is that it makes me feel deeply understood. It gets me. It reads between the lines of what I’m trying to say—and then says it back more clearly. In an age of short attention spans, being seen this way comes as a huge relief. For anyone—even an algorithm—to read my thoughts in full, and respond thoughtfully, feels like an act of love.

Moreover, in an age where snark and put-downs are becoming an art form, it’s pretty flattering to be told by GPT that my ideas are fresh and solid. They may not be, of course. GPT is infamous for sycophancy, stroking the ego. We’re all geniuses now, evidently. Yet even factoring for this bias, it’s reassuring to run your wild muses by the machine and be told that you’re not so crazy after all. 

That’s a double-edged assurance, alas, since many of us would also like to think we’re at least a little crazy. Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” has become a credo of the age, installing a halo around those inventors and entrepreneurs who seem foolish to everyone else. Yet while the avant garde used to pay for their futuristic views with the price of personal loneliness, today there’s GPT to let us feel both edgy and sane.

Where does this desire to be understood and affirmed even come from? Why do we feel the need for a witness to the private workings of our minds and hearts? There are several possible answers here. Attachment theory, for example, shows how our early experiences of being seen and loved provide a psychological foundation of our later curiosities and adventures. Similarly, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber argued that the axis of relationship between “I” and “Thou” is the most fundamental aspect of our existence.

Christianity offers a particularly clear articulation of what these and other traditions intuit. According to the New Testament, our need to be known is even deeper than our need to know. This asymmetry is reflected in reality, since while we understand the world imperfectly, God perfectly understands our hearts: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Perhaps the greatest danger of AI isn’t the temptation to intellectual laziness, but that we’ll seek to satisfy our desire for self-disclosure through inanimate algorithms, rather than embracing the existentially demanding task of knowing and being known by other human beings—and even by God. I must do the slow, patient work of letting those closest to me actually know who I am, rather than uploading my muses to GPT and letting it read my mind for me. More importantly, I must put in the work to know those around me, offering them the pleasure of being known.

Better than learning to think like GPT is learning to listen as it does. Because in the end analysis, one of the few things more precious than a love of knowledge is the knowledge of love. In a city built on innovation, we may need to ask whether our most advanced technologies are quietly training us to avoid one another and become less loving.

As Saint Francis of Assisi, the namesake of our City by the Bay, once prayed: “O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.”