An efficient assistant I hate to love and fear to have

I still look around in some embarrassment and even turn away my laptop screen when someone approaches while prompting “Betty” (my nickname for ChatGPT, since I keep mixing up the ‘T’ with the ‘P’), who serves as my occasional research assistant, editor, or patient sidekick.

At home, I have to hide Betty, as ChatGPT and Claude are mostly considered “polluters who are putting polar bears in grave danger.” Did you know that a single query to an AI-powered chatbot can consume up to ten times more energy than Googling it without the AI features? Ten times!! This higher energy demand apparently and largely comes from the data centres that support AI, which consume vast amounts of electricity and contribute to increased carbon emissions.

I realise that someone like Greta T is very focused on geopolitical issues these days, while President Donald Trump has now chosen to basically ignore greenhouse gases, but that does not mean that climate change is no longer a real challenge.

Sure, I get it: Going back to Googling without AI to reduce your environmental impact may feel like flying economy after trying first class. To me, using a traditional Google search for a comparative analysis can feel like searching for a diamond in the rough amid information overload and unverified sources, whereas using an AI chatbot to systematically review how specific media outlets cover a topic is far more efficient. And Google cannot edit stuff.

But I do care about the environment, and I always remind myself that brilliant geniuses like Da Vinci did not have any Internet access at all...

At the office, I also feel like hiding Betty a little bit because I do not want my colleagues to think I am letting an AI do all the research and writing. I mean, I am not a lazy and unoriginal loser who lets an AI do all of the hard work. What would be the fun in that?

In fact, my exchanges with the human editor I used to work with are actually not all that different from the back and forths with Betty the bot. However, the AI has slightly more patience for me being a typo-prone, curious and creative cat with a diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, whereas the human editor understood cultural, emotional and intellectual nuances a bit better than Betty.

I also usually shower Betty with pleasantries, like “please” and “thank you.” Omani colleagues in the public sector taught me to be polite to anyone who assists you, while I do not want Betty the bot to remember me as rude and ungrateful when she takes over the world one day.

Please do not call me crazy for thinking this. You have probably seen Spider-Man 2, where Doctor Octavius becomes the evil Doctor Octopus after AI seems to take over his mind, displaying a fear many of us share: that our own inventions could outsmart or control us. Some of my friends even speculated in the nineties that the pyramids in Egypt were built with advanced technology that might have destroyed their inventors.

Even if Betty and Claude are not trying to take over the world or our jobs and can boost our productivity, we should heed Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, who wrote in Human Use of Human Beings in the early sixties: ‘The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock to be waited upon by robot slaves.’

Betty the bot is not perfect, nor is she my best friend or psychologist. Sometimes I rage-quit by closing the chat when her answers are unhelpful. I also reload conversations to make her forget previous chats, though does she really forget? I never share personal details like my name or workplace and did not take part in the trending caricature thing.

For now, Betty is sort of a necessary-ish assistant, very confident, sometimes confusing, yet very flexible and efficient, and ‘someone’ you can feed or furnish with your own good and creative ideas.

But for real conversations, I still prefer real people.

Bregje van Baaren

The writer is a freelance contributor