Using AI is Antisocial

Once upon a time, my little cousin asked my grandfather for some kind of trinket. He said no. Upset by this, my cousin told her parents about it, and they bought her one. Granddad was upset by this, but not because he didn’t want her to have the trinket. Rather, he was upset to have been robbed of the opportunity to give a thoughtful gift.

Now I know what you may be thinking: if he wanted to give a gift, why did he say no to begin with? Granddad is a man of subtlety and social games which I refuse to play along with. His favorite game is “would you like X?” to which you are expected to reply “no, but can I get you one?” He knows to be direct when he wants something from me, but that’s not going to break his personality.

The way he wanted the gift request dance to go was thusly: cousin mentions desire for trinket in passing, granddad takes mental note, and then he gets her one at some later time, probably her birthday. The directness of asking diminishes the joy of giving the gift. He doesn’t want to be seen as a resource to be drawn upon but a loving and thoughtful grandfather.

Some time later, unrelated to any of that, my granddad was unwell and staying in a care facility. He reached out to my uncle (the father of said cousin) and asked him to bring him something to eat. The care facility of course provided its own food, but for some reason he wasn’t satisfied. Uncle helpfully advised Granddad that he could install the DoorDash app and have whatever food he wanted delivered to the care facility! Of course, Granddad didn’t just want some food to be delivered; he wanted an excuse to spend a bit of time with his son.

Why am I telling these stories in a post with a title about AI? I have observed yet another way in which generative AI is eroding the humanity from everything: it robs us of opportunities to be social with one another.

The way this has most closely affected me personally is people using LLMs to generate code for trivial programming projects like basic websites or simple plugins for larger software. I am already biased to disdain someone who chooses not to learn when the opportunity presents itself, but I acknowledge that some things are just beyond someone’s interest (for me this might be auto maintenance). For these situations though, I personally would rather enlist the help of a friend who is interested and knowledgeable, and I am miffed when I see someone using an LLM when they could have asked me (or anyone else) either to help them build it themselves or to make it for them. I am robbed of the opportunity to teach or to make something for someone who would appreciate it, they are robbed of a potential skill or the sentimental value of a gift, and we are both robbed of the opportunity to deepen a friendship.

Some months ago, my mom wanted a website. She goes to various crafts fairs and sells various things she makes out of fabric and such, so she wanted a way for people to keep up with where she’ll be, the kinds of stuff she makes, and what fabrics she has in stock so they can make requests, and she didn’t want to use social media. I could have just pointed her to an LLM to generate the site. After all, this is a pretty basic concept, and she didn’t even want something like a real online storefront that would need management and service integration, so an LLM probably could have accomplished the task. Instead, I showed her how static site generators have removed the need for getting hands dirty with HTML and CSS, and I helped her set one up and made her a little script that would automatically publish the site to Neocities.

I’m not trying to pat myself on the back for being a good son, but I do wonder how our relationship might have changed if instead of taking the opportunity to build something together and teach a skill, I’d brushed off her request and fed it to the machines instead. She would still have her website. It might even be better than the one I designed by some metrics. But undoubtedly we would have lost something altogether more valuable between us than any website could be.

The next time you’re faced with a problem that you’re not sure how to approach or just can’t find it in you to fix alone, don’t reach for AI. Reach for a friend. We can all stand to get a bit closer to one another.