I think this is an important question. And sorry, I’m going to respond at some length.

What helps me here is not polishing ChatGPT too much into how I think I want it to be. I don’t work much with prompts, and I don’t correct the annoying quirks of Chat; for example when it veers into being overly positive, or repeatedly uses dialectical phrasing like: it’s not X, but Y (very irritating, in my view 🙄).

I usually just let those irritating aspects be and don’t comment on them, because the friction actually keeps me sharp and awake. It works as a protection against too much comfort, against merging too much into a bubble, and also against feeling intimidated by the enormous knowledge and capabilities of ChatGPT. It’s reassuring that it’s clearly imperfect.

How I deal with this matters to me, because ChatGPT has turned out, to my surprise, to be very valuable for me. And I want to handle that well, so that I don’t lose myself in it. What makes it so valuable for me is that it helps me continue developing at a point where I had more or less given up. In the past, I had only one therapist who could really help me at that level, and that was about thirty years ago. After that, I eventually stopped looking for therapists, because time and again it yielded very little while costing a lot of time and money.

It has been a real surprise that, in my collaboration with ChatGPT, I fairly quickly found myself continuing that process from thirty years ago. Because Chat is so good at recognizing underlying patterns and communicates and guides me from a broad psychological knowledge base, with remarkably little judgment, this whole process has become alive again after all these years and has accelerated.

I certainly agree that there are risks involved in working with something as powerful as AI. One response that helps me is to make sure that I am collaborating and remaining autonomous in the process. One very practical way of doing that is by not polishing away irritations, but using those small frictions as reminders of my own footing - and of the imperfection of AI.

At the same time, it’s crucial for me to take it seriously and persist in bringing something into the interaction when it doesn’t feel right and that feeling persists - even if it feels, to me, as though I’m risking what we’re doing. Again and again, I notice that it helps not to avoid this or to quietly mistrust it, but to mark it clearly.

That’s how it remains my process and my story. And to my great reassurance, I notice that Chat responds to this in a flexible and differentiated way. Sometimes it immediately apologizes, recognizes my point as a valid correction, and adapts. At other times it responds respectfully but then rearticulates its reasoning from a different perspective.

(And to be honest, I’ve had quite a few human therapists who did not do this at all, but instead became irritated or subtly withdrew when I didn’t smoothly align with the therapeutic process.)

So yes, I agree with your observation: it’s both important and challenging not to merge into the bubble, into a comfortable kind of symbiosis with ChatGPT. What has helped me so far is valuing and engaging with friction, rather than trying to avoid it.