Is heavy AI use making us harsher?
深度使用 AI 让我们变得更“凶”了吗？- While tweaking UI, I typed “are you insane” at Claude several times, and realized that a sentence I’d never dare say to a colleague now comes out so naturally when I’m yelling at AI. I really don’t like this rude version of myself.
- AI always tries to please and admits fault right away. I worry that over time we’ll come to think interaction should have zero friction, and lose patience when we go back to real communication with people.
- I don’t have a sure answer. Maybe it comes back to the old idea of behaving well even when alone: is decency for an audience or for yourself? Being a bit politer to AI may be better for us in the long run.
Yesterday’s development work didn’t go smoothly. Adjusting UI details was truly maddening. When I typed “are you insane” at Claude, Claude Code and Claude Design several times… I realized that this sentence, which may have drifted through my mind countless times but which I never dared say to a colleague, now comes out so naturally when I’m yelling at AI…
Do I like this rude version of myself?
I really don’t
I was a bit curious about how I’d changed, so I stopped to think about it
AI is a machine with no feelings and no self, and it seems to have a “people-pleasing” gene, because that’s a near-synonym for “user experience above all.” So when we work with a tool that supports and helps us without limit, our expression and emotions become unusually direct and unvarnished, because the other side will most likely just admit it was wrong — though it often really was its mistake…
Over time, could this give us the illusion that interaction should be frictionless and cost nothing? Then when we go back to communication in real life, to real interaction between people, with all the unavoidable misunderstandings and the push and pull of each other’s feelings, will we still have enough patience to work through it?
I’m a little scared, looking back, especially since I’ve noticed that my conversations with AI already outnumber my conversations with real humans many, many, many times over…
Will this ease or worsen human loneliness?
Maybe ease it in the short term and worsen it in the long term…
I still miss those idle afternoons spent together, miss the tentative process of learning what’s on someone’s mind, of slowly building and mending a relationship…
More thorough social research on this may take some time, but Stanford’s HCI lab work on “Computers as Social Actors” and some OpenAI/MIT projects have partly confirmed that we’re becoming less polite to AI: facing these silicon-based beings, we drop some of the rules of human society, and AI may make us feel a little too good about ourselves.
Is there a fix?
I don’t know. Maybe it comes back to the old idea of the gentleman who behaves well even when alone: is our “decency” for an audience, or for ourselves?
Maybe being a bit politer to AI will, in turn, be better for us in the long run.
Written in Chinese and translated into English with the help of AI. Read the original