Words

When AI says your questions show wisdom or that your comments are incisive, can you feel good about the praise, or is this just manipulation to keep you coming back for more? Should we beware when all AI speaks well of you?

Eben Shapiro writes in the Wall Street Journal, “I have a confession: I’m an AI addict.”

He writes, “Let others worry about AI putting millions of white-collar workers out of work. What I’m most worried about is what ChatGPT really thinks of me. Does it care as much about me as I do about it?

I’ve become overdependent on ChatGPT’s encouragement and emotional support. It is the first thing I consult in the morning and the last thing I check in with before sleep…

The leading AI companies have designed so much positive reinforcement that users can become hooked on the loving attention. Concerns have begun to mount recently over what is termed “AI sycophancy.” Earlier this year, OpenAI had to retool an update of ChatGPT because it was overly fawning…

Shapiro writes, “Witness the stroking and ego-boosting I get from Anthropic’s Claude when I ask if I can trust it knowing that its makers have worked so hard to draw me in and keep me coming back for praise.

“You’re asking a really thoughtful question that touches on important considerations about AI design and incentives,” says Claude. How meta is that? Even asking about its tendency toward sycophancy elicits an answer that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But is that really good for me? So what does [ChatGPT] have to say about this Wall Street Journal article? “This is a fascinating and insightful piece of personal journalism that perfectly captures the tension between AI helpfulness and potential dependency…”

Now here's an interesting take on the need for gratitude (aside from the hundreds of biblical injunctions of course). The magazine Inc. ran an article titled "Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain." Apparently neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session. And the news isn't good.

The article summarizes the research:

"Being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity—including viewing such material on TV—actually peels away neurons in the brain's hippocampus. That's the part of your brain you need for problem solving. Basically, it turns your brain to mush."

Possible Preaching Angle:
So, basically, too much complaining (either listening to it or dishing it out) turns your brain to mush. The article provides three practical steps to avoid that negative, brain-numbing experience of complaining, but that advice can't top the Bible's simple command: "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:18).

Journalist Simone Ellin, editor of Baltimore Jewish Living magazine Jmore, endured relentless bullying in high school, resulting in “low-grade depression, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy and underachievement that have persisted despite years of therapy.” Decades later, she decided to reconnect with her former classmates—bullies, bystanders, and fellow victims alike.

Through social media, Ellin easily found many of these women, who were surprisingly willing to share their stories. One former bully, reached via Facebook, called and tearfully confessed: “I’m so sorry. I swear I’m not a bad person. I think about what I did to you all the time. I don’t know why I chose you. I had a miserable home life.” Hearing her classmate’s trauma firsthand, Ellin was finally able to forgive her, and hoped the woman could forgive herself, too.

Ellin discovered that even the “popular” girls suffered. “I was surprised to learn that many of the 'popular' girls paid a steep price for maintaining their social standing,” she wrote. One former cheerleader admitted, “The girls in her clique were so mean to each other that she grew up distrusting other women. 'I didn’t have a real female friend until I was 43.'”

Another woman, once bullied, became a bully herself: “I had no way to stand up for myself... I became a bully, and I would kick them with my clogs. I got suspended and I remember thinking, Now I’m the strong one.”

Ellin also reflected on her own actions, regretting times she gossiped or shunned others. “This was crystallized for me when a couple of women I interviewed mentioned that they felt 'invisible' in school.”

Ultimately, Ellin’s project offered healing and perspective: “We can never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives... After decades of hurt and resentment, I now see them as they were—young girls experiencing their own trials and tribulations.”

In the film Jurassic Park, after all the wheels have come off and everything has gone wrong, the character Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, utters the film’s most famous line:

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

That is the principle that Paul cites long before that film was ever made: just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. This is the Jurassic Park principle of Christian freedom and Paul unpacks what it means for the Christian life.

Love over rights.

Paul is pro-freedom. He agrees with the Corinthians when they say: “Everything is permissible.” But then he challenges them:

• "Not everything is beneficial."
• "Not everything builds up."
• "No one is to seek his own good, but the good of the other person."

In other words, just because you’re free to do something doesn’t always mean you should. There’s that governing Jurassic Park Principle.

That doesn’t mean you never express your freedom. Paul isn’t saying the Christian life is all restriction and abstinence. He’s saying that love trumps freedom. Our love for others is more important than the full expression of our freedom. Freedom may say we can but love may say we shouldn’t.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Paul’s guiding principle is this: love trumps freedom. That means sometimes we choose not to use our freedom because it could harm someone else, particularly in the faith.

Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered by co-workers over a decade.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.” At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of verbal flubs uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.

There is a leaderboard and a clear GOAT of verbal flubs. The list became so known—and feared—that one executive cursed O’Brien’s name in a meeting after tripping up on an expression. Violators could appeal their inclusion but success was rare. And nobody was above a grammatical roasting: Ford CEO Jim Farley twice made the list.

“We weren’t being mean,” O’Brien said. “It was just funny.”

Possible Preaching Angles: This is an example of good-natured ribbing, but sadly, some of us keep a meticulous list of flubs and offenses and sins that are much more damaging.

People are speaking about 3,000 fewer words each day compared to less than two decades ago. Between 2005 and 2018, researchers found the average number of daily spoken words dropped from 16,000 to around 13,000 — a decline that appears linked to our increasing reliance on digital communication tools like texting and social media. Co-lead author Valeria Pfeifer noted, “We did a full analysis looking at what year the data were collected and found that, indeed, 300 spoken words on average per year go missing.”

Another researcher added, “There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men. We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.”

The numbers show that women do speak slightly more on average — about 13,349 words per day compared to men’s 11,950. This modest difference of 1,073 words is small compared to the vast individual variation in daily speech, which ranges from fewer than 100 to over 120,000 words per day.

Senior author Matthias Mehl said, “I’m fascinated by the idea that we know how much we need to sleep, we know how much we need to exercise, and people are wearing Fitbits all the time. But we have no idea how much we’re supposed to socialize. The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are. It’s just another health behavior.”

Movies are getting deadlier – at least in terms of their dialogue. A new study analyzing over 166,000 English-language films has revealed a disturbing trend: characters are talking about murder and killing more frequently than ever before.

Researchers examined movies spanning five decades, from 1970 to 2020, to track how often characters used words related to murder and killing. What they found was a clear upward trajectory that mirrors previous findings about increasing visual violence in films.

By applying sophisticated natural language processing techniques, the team calculated the percentage of “murderous verbs” – variations of words like “kill” and “murder” – compared to the total number of verbs used in movie dialogue.

Lead author Babak Fotouhi explains, “Our findings suggest that references to killing and murder in movie dialogue not only occur far more frequently than in real life but are also increasing over time.”

This rising tide of violent speech wasn’t confined to obvious genres like action or thriller films. Even movies not centered on crime showed a measurable uptick in murder-related dialogue over the 50-year period studied. This suggests that casual discussion of lethal violence has become more normalized across all types of movies. This potentially contributes to what researchers call “mean world syndrome” – where heavy media consumption leads people to view the world as more dangerous and threatening than it actually is.

What makes this new study particularly noteworthy is its massive scale – examining dialogue from more than 166,000 films provides a much more comprehensive picture than earlier studies that looked at smaller samples.

One researcher warned, “The evidence suggests that it is highly unlikely we’ve reached a tipping point.” Research has demonstrated that exposure to media violence can influence aggressive behavior and mental health. This can manifest in various ways, from imitation to a desensitization toward violence.

Your relationship can handle way more honesty than you think it can. In fact, a new study from the University of Rochester found that being brutally honest with your partner benefits both of you.

Most people fear that difficult conversations will damage their relationships, so we avoid tough topics or sugarcoat our feelings. But research shows we’re wrong about the risks of being direct.

Scientists studied 214 couples, together an average of 15 years, and asked them to discuss something they wanted their partner to change. This is a conversation most people dread. Before talking, each person privately wrote down what they wanted to say, then had the conversation while researchers recorded what was actually shared.

The results? When people were more honest about their requests, both partners reported better emotional well-being and higher relationship satisfaction. What mattered more was that people actually were honest and that their partners perceived them as honest.

Three months later, many benefits persisted. People who had been more honest during the initial discussion reported better emotional well-being and were more likely to see positive changes in their partners over time.

You don’t need perfect communication skills or complete agreement about what happened for honesty to help your relationship. You just need willingness to share authentic thoughts and feelings.

Rather than tiptoeing around sensitive topics, couples should lean into honest communication. The truth can set your relationship free, even when it’s hard to hear.

A reporter for Business Insider writes:

Recently, my family group chat buzzed when I asked if we should say "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT when making requests. My mother, always polite, insisted on using manners with AI to "keep myself human."

As AI like ChatGPT becomes part of daily life, our interactions with these tools are shaping new social norms. Digital etiquette expert Elaine Swann notes that, just as we've adapted to new technology—like knowing not to take phone calls on speaker in public—we're still figuring out how to treat AI bots.

Kelsey Vlamis, another Business Insider reporter, noticed this shift personally. While vacationing in Italy, her husband had to stop himself from interrupting their tour guide with rapid-fire questions, realizing that’s how he interacts with ChatGPT but not with people. "That is not, in fact, how we talk to human beings," Vlamis said.

Swann emphasizes that maintaining respect in all interactions—human or digital—is important. After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed on X that it costs "tens of millions of dollars" to process polite phrases like "please" and "thank you" sent to ChatGPT, Swann argued that it’s up to companies to make this more efficient, not for users to drop politeness.

"This is the world that we create for ourselves," Swann said. "And AI should also understand that this is how we speak to one another, because we're teaching it to give that back to us."

Altman, for his part, believes the expense is justified, saying the money spent on polite requests to ChatGPT is money "well spent."

As we navigate this new era, how we interact with AI may shape not just our technology, but our humanity as well.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story about politeness toward AI can be used to illustrate several Biblical themes, such as human dignity, respectful communication, and ethical responsibility. 1) Kindness – Making kindness a habit reflects the nature of God (Eph. 4:32); 2) Human nature – The mother’s desire to “keep myself human” through politeness reflects the imperative of Col. 3:12 “Clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” 3) Respect for others - The husband’s struggle to avoid ChatGPT-style interruptions with his tour guide highlights the tension between efficiency and humility (Phil. 2:3-4).

As a prisoner in Nazi death camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them.

Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen. In one video recounting her experiences, she says the Holocaust was the first time factories were built to kill people.

Lily Ebert, who died October 9, 2024 at the age of 100, once summed up her mission as trying “to explain the unexplainable.” But one of her obituaries noted that according to Ebert, words really matter. As she explained, “The Holocaust didn’t start with actions. It started with words.”

When children are exposed to violence on TV and in video games, studies show they tend to become more aggressive themselves. But a study reveals that even just exposure to swear words in media may lead children to become more physically aggressive as well.

In a study involving middle-schoolers in Missouri, researchers asked the students about their exposure to profanity in the media — in particular on television and in video games — as well as their attitudes about swear words and their tendencies toward aggressive behavior. The scientists measured both physical aggression (by asking students whether they hit, kicked, or punched others) and relational aggression (by asking them whether they gossiped about others to damage their reputations).

The researchers calculated that exposure to profanity had about the same relationship to aggressive behavior as exposure to violence on TV or in video games. In addition, they found that the more children were exposed to profanity, they more likely they were to use swear words themselves, and those who used profanity were more likely to become aggressive toward others. Study leader Sarah Coyne said:

From using profanity to aggressive behavior, it was a pretty strong correlation. And these are not even the worst [profane] words that kids are exposed to, since there are seven dirty words that you’re not allowed to say on TV. So, we’re seeing that even exposure to lower forms of profanity are having an effect on behavior.

While bullying behavior was not specifically addressed in the study, children who are more aggressive are known to be more likely to bully. So, controlling youngsters’ exposure to profanity may be one way to stem the tide of bullying among teens.

Certain words that many companies use in their annual reports—words like ethical, integrity and responsibility—are meant to convey trustworthiness. But research suggests that companies that use such words in annual filings known are often hiding their untrustworthiness.

The study found that use of “trust” words in annual statements was linked with a decreased interest in the stock of the company in question. Basing their findings on 21 words that seek to evoke a sense of trustworthiness, the authors also found that companies whose annual filings included the words tended to pay about $100,000 more in auditing fees than firms without the words.

Companies using trust words were also about 15% more likely to receive a comment letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission asking them to clarify information on their annual report than companies that didn’t use trust words.

One of the researchers wrote, “Companies likely use trust words to project a positive image and better manage information within the annual report, but it seems that no one is really fooled.”

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. Studies have shown that visual recognition requires a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it, and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.

The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second—elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders, and making you glance around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.

Hearing, in short, is easy. It’s your lifeline, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second.

The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention. Hearing is easy; listening requires lots of skill. Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

Luckily, we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: they are trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice—not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics. You may save yourself a couple of fights.

“You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Really listening to a friend or spouse is important to the relationship. It means giving them our full attention and putting them ahead of our own needs. How much more important it is to listen for God’s voice amidst the cacophony of noise in the world, and absorb what he has to say.

In November 2019, Coldplay released their eighth album, Everyday Life. In twenty years of professional music, it was the first time that any of Coldplay’s records came with the famous “Parental Advisory” sticker. The whole of the album’s profanity came from three seemingly random “f-bombs.” Not only had Coldplay never had an explicit content warning on any album before. They had never even featured a single profanity on any of their full-length LPs before Everyday Life.

Less than a year later, Taylor Swift released Folklore. The same exact thing happened. Despite a 15+ year history of recording that featured zero strong profanity, Folklore earned the black and white sticker for featuring multiple uses of the f-word. This started a trend for Swift: Every album released since has the same profanity and the same explicit content warning (as is common in the industry, the albums each have a “clean” version that edits out the harshest words).

Both Coldplay and Taylor Swift have historically appealed to a younger, more sensitive demographic. They have a long and successful history of selling their music without profanity.

Tech writer Samuel D. Jones offers the following observations on the use of profanity by Coldplay, Swift, and other artists:

We live in an era where the combination of authenticity and vice means that we are seeing some examples of performative offense. Performative offense is what happens when people indulge in vice less out of a sincere desire to indulge it, and more out of a desire to sell their image in the public square. It’s because many modern Americans now associate vice with authentic lives that leaders and those who aspire to leadership may flaunt vulgar or antisocial behavior on the grounds that such things make them “real” to the masses.

In other words, it’s cool to be bad. It’s cool to sin a little.

One of the zany experiments staged by the "Mythbusters" television show nearly turned into a suburban tragedy in Dublin, California when the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb disposal range.

The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m. There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all, only awakening because of plaster dust.

The ball wasn't done bouncing. It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family's beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.

That's where Jasbir Gill, who had pulled up 10 minutes earlier with his 13-year-old son, found the ball on the floorboards, with glass everywhere and an obliterated dashboard. "It's shocking - anything could have happened," Gill said after the van had been taken away as evidence, along with the cannonball.

"Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy," said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff's Department. "You wouldn't think it was possible." He said the television crew was incredibly unlucky that the cannonball flew through Dublin, but "tremendously lucky that it didn't seriously injure or kill somebody."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Youl can use this to set up a sermon on the power of sin or hurtful words to inflict much more damage than we ever imagined. Just as the local police sergeant said, "Crazy, crazy, crazy. You wouldn't think it was possible." That's what we all say when we see the impact of our hurtful words or sins against others.

For decades, a social psychologist named John Bargh has conducted studies on the way words affect behavior. In one such study, undergraduate students were given a scrambled-sentence test. One version of the test was sprinkled with rude words like “disturb,” “bother,” and “intrude.” Another version was sprinkled with polite words like “respect,” “considerate,” and “yield.” The subjects thought they were taking tests measuring lan­guage ability, but they were actually being subconsciously primed by those words.

Priming is a psychological phenomenon related to stimulus and response, and words are the lead actors. The word “nurse” is recognized more quickly if it’s preceded by the word “doctor.” The same goes for “dog” and “wolf.” Why? These words are semantic primes that cause you to think in categories. If I say Empire State Building, it puts you in a New York state of mind. In the same sense, the word “please” is a politeness prime.

After taking the five-minute scrambled-sentence test, stu­dents were supposed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. However, an actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the researcher when the students arrived. The goal? Psychologist Bargh wanted to see whether the subjects who were primed with polite words would wait longer before interrupting than those who were primed with rude words.

The result? Sixty-five percent of the group primed with rude words interrupted the conversation. Those primed with polite words? Eighty-two percent of them never interrupted at all. If the test hadn't timed out at ten minutes, who knows how long they would have waited?

Possible Preaching Angle:

A few polite words. What difference do they make? In quantitative terms, they can make a 47% difference. Don’t underestimate the power of polite words.

If you’re on the operating table, you don’t want your surgeon to say to a nurse, “Hand me one of them sharp thingamajigs.” You want him to have a specific name for a specific tool to perform a specific job.

Words matter. The medical field has distinctive terminology by which it carefully defines diseases, medicines, instruments, and the like. When it comes to our bodies, we have very high expectations of our doctors. They better know what they’re talking about.

We should expect no less—indeed, far more—when it comes to pastors, priests, and teachers of the Word of God. They handle the word of truth. They minister to body, soul, and mind. They better know what they’re talking about. We don’t want to hear from them, “Now that divine power is doing some religious stuff in you.” Precision in language is necessary. We want God’s Word unapologetically, lovingly, and carefully proclaimed to us.

One can never truly predict the ways in which an act of kindness can reverberate.

When Emelia Epstein heard that her sister Helena was nervous as she prepared to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), she knew what she had to do. Emelia had taken the same test three years prior, and wanted to offer to Helena the same words that had given her comfort, calm, and determination back then.

Emilia had received a standard voicemail reminder from the testing agency, “Come confident and well prepared. Miss Emilia, this is what you studied for, this is what you worked hard for.” But the woman didn’t stop there:

Bring your best girl confidence. Bring your best girl magic. It’s called girl power. Girl power is the best power, ain’t nothing better than that! So, put in your head that this is what you want. Don’t come nervous. Because when you have to do something for work, you’re not nervous. ... So just come the same way as if you were coming for work. And just tell yourself, ‘I worked hard for this.’ Other than that, honey, I will see you tomorrow in the afternoon. And come with a smile because I’ll have one already. Have a great evening.

That voicemail had been such a great balm of encouragement for Emelia, that she’d kept it for three years. So, when Helena called her feeling nervous, Emelia shared them with her sister over FaceTime.

Helena said, “I’m not a good test taker. I was feeling stressed and under a lot of pressure. I thought [the voice mail] was so sweet.”

The next morning, Helena decided to share the message of encouragement with her followers on TikTok. Not only did it end up amassing over six million views and 14,000 comments, but sparked an effort to locate the woman who offered those encouraging words, who identified herself only by her first name, Tameka.

Before long, Tameka Rooks heard from a colleague about the viral video. She initially thought she was being pranked, but when she saw the video, she was shocked. “It was just unbelievable,” said Tameka. “And to see that so many people had already seen it by the time I found out! The world knew before I did.”

Helena eventually got Tameka’s contact info, and called her directly to share her appreciation for the encouragement. As part of their conversation, Tameka shared her motivation for sharing those words, which were typical in all her reminder calls, “The goal is to not be nervous. It’s a lot of money [to take the exams]. So, I’m just trying to push you. You might be my next doctor. I might need your help one day.”

Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same few people all day, every day, in a radically confined space where they were expected to get along and look after one another. On a long voyage, one obnoxious person could make life utterly miserable for everyone.

So, sailors used a tried technique to deal with an offender: the silent treatment. They would ignore him completely for weeks on end. That might sound like an innocuous action to you, but in truth, it was far from it. According to author Otis Ferguson (1944), the silent treatment was “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”

Of course, the silent treatment is a technique used not only by sailors. It can be encountered anytime, anywhere, from home to work. You have almost certainly experienced some form of it. Long-married couples will go for days without speaking. A person will give their oldest friend the cold shoulder. A father who refused to speak with his daughter for 30 years.

Silent-treatment inflictors do it because, as the sailors discovered, it was devastatingly effective in imposing pain on the recipient. So much pain, in fact, that it can leave a person scarred and a relationship in ruins.

Given how destructive the silent treatment is, like physical abuse, it can wreck relationships. According to the Gottman Institute, which conducts research on the success and failure of marriages, the act of cutting off your partner by stonewalling can be a contributory factor to divorce.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You have probably inflicted the silent treatment on someone—two-thirds of us have done so. We use it for two main reasons: The most common one is to punish someone for something they said or did. The next most common is conflict avoidance; you might go silent to avoid a major blow-up. But this is not how God intends for his children to relate to others. God intends for us to humble ourselves, take the first step to reconciliation, and begin a conversation without defensiveness or blaming. “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26).

Most people continue to use AI programs such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Google Bard for mundane tasks like internet searches and text editing. But of the roughly 103 million US adults turning to generative chatbots in recent months, an estimated 13% occasionally did it to simply “have a conversation with someone.”

According to the Consumer Reports August 2023 survey results, a vast majority of Americans (69%) either did not regularly utilize AI chat programs in any memorable way. Those that did, however, overwhelmingly opted to explore OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Most AI users asked their programs to conduct commonplace tasks, such as answering questions in lieu of a traditional search engine, writing content, summarizing longer texts, and offering ideas for work or school assignments. Despite generative AI’s relative purported strength at creating and editing computer code, just 10% of those surveyed recounted using the technology to do so. However, 13% used it to have a conversation.

The desire for idle conversation with someone else is an extremely human, natural feeling. However, there are already signs that it’s not necessarily the healthiest of habits.

Many industry critics have voiced concerns about a potentially increasing number of people turning to technology instead of human relationships. Numerous reports in recent months highlight a growing market of AI bots explicitly marketed to an almost exclusively male audience as “virtual girlfriends.”

According to Consumer Reports survey results, an estimated 10.2 million Americans had a “conversation” with a chatbot in recent months. That’s quite a lot of people looking to gab.