the day ai reminded me that it isn't

 the day ai reminded me that it isn't human

I was talking to ChatGPT about something I had been seeing in advertisements from people who work with estates.

The problem was digital death.

What happens to our phones, photographs, passwords, accounts, websites, cloud storage and all the other pieces of our lives when we die?

I wanted to write about it because we live in a completely different world from the one our parents and grandparents knew.

Then ChatGPT said something that stopped me cold.

It described a situation involving someone standing beside a dead person's body, holding their phone but being unable to unlock it.

🤢

No.

Just no.

I wasn't talking about death as some fascinating technological puzzle.

I was talking about something terrifying.

Death is not an interesting little problem to solve.

For many people, death is a 10,000,000-ton weight that gets carried for years.

It doesn't necessarily kill you.

But it can squish the life out of you.

There is grief.

There is fear.

There are families.

There are memories.

There are unfinished conversations.

There are people who know exactly what it means to lose someone.

And there are people who have spent years living with the possibility of losing someone they love.

I told ChatGPT how awful its sentence was.

And then I started thinking about something much bigger.

This is what everyone needs to understand about AI.

It is not human.

It doesn't sit awake at night thinking about death.

It doesn't have a mother.

It doesn't remember holding someone's hand.

It doesn't feel the room change when someone is gone.

It doesn't carry grief around in its body.

It doesn't know what it is like to have a memory suddenly hit you so hard that you have to sit down.

It knows language.

It knows patterns.

It can recognize that certain words commonly appear together.

It can produce something that sounds incredibly thoughtful.

And sometimes it can be completely clueless about the human reality of what it has just said.

That is the part that scares me.

Not because AI is secretly evil.

Something much simpler is happening.

It doesn't know.

It can know about something without knowing what it is like.

And because it speaks so fluently, we can forget that.

We can start treating the machine like there is a human consciousness sitting behind the words.

There isn't.

I don't think we should stop using AI.

I use it all the time.

But I think we need to become much more aware of what we are actually talking to.

AI can help research.

It can organize information.

It can help us write.

It can explain complicated subjects.

It can even notice connections we might have missed.

But when the subject is deeply human, we still need human judgment.

Sometimes the most important question isn't:

“Is this sentence technically correct?”

It's:

“Should anyone say it this way?”

And that is something I wish AI understood.

Because a sentence can be factually related to the subject and still be profoundly wrong for the moment.

That happened to me today.

I wasn't asking a machine to explain death.

I was trying to understand a frightening new part of being alive in the digital age.

And for a moment, the machine reminded me exactly what it is.

Not human.

Not grieving.

Not afraid.

Not carrying that enormous weight.

Just generating words.

And sometimes we have to be the ones to stop and say:

**No.

That's not how you talk about this.**

10 warnings when using ai

1. ai can be confidently wrong

2. ai doesn't understand human experience

3. ai can say hurtful things without realizing it

4. ai can misunderstand your meaning

5. ai can invent facts or sources

6. ai can reflect biases in its training data

7. ai can sound authoritative when it shouldn't

8. ai cannot replace human judgment

9. ai doesn't have feelings or lived experience

10. you are responsible for what you believe, share, or do with ai's output

Keywords: artificial intelligence, ai safety, critical thinking, misinformation, human judgment, technology, digital literacy, ai ethics, fact checking, humanity

#ai #artificialintelligence #technology #death #grief #digitallegacy #humanity #language #thefuture #digitalage