How to win fake friends and influence fake people
Friday, 25 April 2025 ()
We’re all talking to fake people now, but most people don’t realize that interacting with AI is a subtle and powerful skill that can and should be learned.
The first step in developing this skill set is to acknowledge to yourself what kind of AI you’re talking to and why you’re talking to it.
AI voice interfaces are powerful because our brains are hardwired for human speech. Even babies’ brains are tuned to voices before they can talk, picking up language patterns early on. This built-in conversational skill helped our ancestors survive and connect, making language one of our most essential and deeply rooted abilities.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t think more clearly about how to talk when we speak to AI. After all, we already speak differently to other people in different situations. For example, we talk one way to our colleagues at work and a different way to our spouses.
Yet people still talk to AI like it’s a person, which it’s not; like it can understand, which it cannot; and like it has feelings, pride, or the ability to take offense, which it doesn’t.
*The two main categories of talking AI*
It’s helpful to break the world of talking AI (both spoken and written) into two categories:
1. Fantasy role playing, which we use for entertainment.
2. Tools, which we use for some productive end, either to learn information or to get a service to do something useful for us.
Let’s start with role-playing AI.
*AI for pretending*
You may have heard of a site and app called
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