At the time, I chalked this up to cognitive offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the amount of thinking required to complete a task. Looking back, though, I think it was an early case of emotional offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction.
You’ve probably heard of extreme cases where people treat bots as lovers, therapists or friends. But many more have them intervene in their social lives in subtler ways. On dating apps, people are leaning on A.I. to help them seem more educated or confident; one app, Hinge, reports that many younger users “vibe check” messages with A.I. before sending them. (Young men, especially, lean on it to help them initiate conversations.)
In the classroom, the domain I know best, some students are not just using the tools to reduce effort on homework, but also to avoid the stress of an unscripted conversation with a professor — the possibility of making a mistake, drawing a blank or looking dumb — even when their interactions are not graded.
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