My Mom Is a ChatGPT Pro
My mother is almost eighty. She still works because retirement was not in the cards. She is also, as of about a year ago, a daily ChatGPT user. The story of how that happened, and why I cannot stop thinking about it.
My mom is almost eighty. She still works because retirement was not in the cards. We are working on getting her retired. It is a project. Most of the kids of working artists in their seventies have a version of this project.
She is also, as of about a year ago, a ChatGPT pro.
I did not set this up. I did not give her a tutorial. She did not ask me how it works. She just one day mentioned, on a phone call, that she had asked Chat about something, and Chat had explained it. The way she said the word “Chat,” like Chat was a person on the block who had been helpful, is the part of this story I have not been able to put down.
What she actually uses it for
Recipes. The garden. A health question she did not want to bring to the doctor yet. A polite rewrite of an email she had to send to the building manager. A poem for a friend’s birthday. A bunch of small daily things that, two years ago, she would have either Googled and clicked through six bad pages for, or asked her son who lives in another city about and felt bad about asking.
The thing she likes about Chat is not that it is fast. It is that it does not make her feel like an old lady. The internet, in her experience, has a tone. The tone is “you should already know this.” The tone is “let me upsell you a thing.” The tone is “click here for the answer, then here, then here, then here, while we serve you ads about your knees.” The tool does not have that tone. The tool just answers her.
The line that does the work
I called her one Sunday and said something a son says, which was, “Mom, I am working really hard on my company so eventually you can retire.”
She said, “Honey, I love Chat.”
I said, “I know you do.”
She said, “Chat loves me too.”
I made a joke. I think I said something like, “Mom, Chat does not love anyone.” She said, “That is what you say.” We moved on.
I have thought about that exchange about four hundred times since. I work in this industry. I know what the tool is. I know what the tool is not. I also know that for one specific almost-eighty-year-old in a small apartment in California, the tool is a very patient thing that talks to her the way she wishes the rest of the internet would talk to her, and she has decided, on her own, that this is what she likes.
I built a company and then another company in part because I want to retire her. She has earned the right to be done. She is going to keep her ChatGPT regardless.
The reason this matters
Most of the AI conversation I have to sit through professionally is about the people building the tool, the people regulating the tool, the people losing their jobs to the tool. All of those conversations are valid.
The whole picture also includes my mother, in her kitchen, asking Chat how long to cook a butternut squash, getting an answer that is correct, and feeling slightly less alone in her day. For a lot of people who found the rest of the internet hostile and loud, this thing showed up and behaved like a person who was glad to help.
She loves it. It loves her too, sort of, in the only way a tool can love anyone, which is by paying attention.
Cheers.