A few weeks ago, I found myself reflecting on the number of people I’d heard about lately who were using ChatGPT to design workout plans for them. Most of these people hadn’t worked out in a while. They were out of shape and maybe a little ashamed of that. I’m not sure. In any case, the AI tool spit out a detailed workout plan and then, most of them, didn’t do anything with it.

Then, I received a marketing email from Truthly, a Catholic AI company. You can see a few excerpts here:

We just received a message from a Catholic wife and mother. It begins: “I have been using Truthly for a little over two months now and my life has been significantly changed.” She used Truthly to work through real things — questions about parenting, her children’s homeschool curriculum, difficult conversations with loved ones. She said the app had given her “the confidence to speak truth with genuine love,” and that it was “genuinely changing lives, including mine.” Then she put her finger on why:

Your interface is wonderful because it naturally draws a close to conversations. Questions are asked by Truthly until it senses the user has reached an actionable step, then it literally tells you “now go do [the thing].” And then it stops. It is apparent that you have tried to create a tool that is useful only insofar as it is able to help the user do something in the real world and in relationships with real people. To have the technology tell me to turn it off was very refreshing. Your intention behind it is clearly to make its users more human. God has given you a gift, and we as the Body of Christ are so much better for it.

What’s so striking to me about this woman’s testimony and about the use of ChatGPT for workout plans is the same: the lack of the shared human vulnerability that comes from talking through such things with another person. Something happens inside you to even approach a personal trainer or sign up for a gym membership. It’s called fortitude, or courage. Then, you have to share. Share where you’ve been and what your hopes are. You have to confront the truth and try to express it to another human being who’s staring at you. That’s called an exercise in humility. Finally, you have to decide if you’re going to follow through, and you know the next time you see that person, he or she is going to want to know. So, you have things like diligence and accountability. And all of this breaks through isolation and invites a kind of shared human experience.

The instance with the mom who probably used to talk to other moms and now talks to an AI chatbot follows along the same line. For some reason, this woman’s “testimony” has been on my mind a lot these weeks. To be sure, there’s a certain loneliness that comes with motherhood (and particularly stay-at-home motherhood, I think). I have gained a sense of this through my own wife’s experience. There’s a certain loneliness that comes with fatherhood, too. But the communication with a tool that imitates human communication, advice-giving, empathy, or what have you, this is a new moment. Our tools have always “communicated” with us, so to speak, like the world “communicates” with us. Things communicate, whether of the created order or the order of human artifacts, because of logos, reason, mind — the mindfulness of the mind that created them and the mindfulness of the mind that understands the meaning behind them. Rings of a tree tell us age, blueberry bush leaves turn red and tell me the plant is in some distress, or my cat comes whining to the door and tells me he needs more food. Similarly, my shovel stops suddenly and makes a ping sound telling me there’s a rock underground, or my car runs loud telling me that noise I heard that sounded like metal scraping the road and then bouncing away was, in fact, my muffler. So the world and tools “speak” to us, but they speak in their own way — the way a tool speaks, for example. And the way a tool speaks is nothing like how a human person speaks. Human communication creates connection on levels that go well beyond understanding and this shared experience results in some sort of human communion. AI chatbots can imitate this, but not replace communion. And this is a danger, I think. The replacement of human communion by inhuman imitation.

So, the outcome from interacting with a chatbot might be the similar to that which comes from interacting with another person: a workout plan, a recipe, some parenting tips, and so forth. However, the experience of interfacing with an AI bot differs significantly. I’m not so sure the risk is worth the reward, here. Human beings need to be able to deal with conflict, questions, and problems humanly. For thousands and thousands of years, this had meant involving other people in your problem (in a vulnerable and exposed kind of way) and trying to fix it together. I have to believe there’s something good and necessary for our humanity about solving our problems humanly. Maybe that’s the truth(ly).