Would you rather: Ask chatgpt or your mother?

“Would You Rather” is one of our family’s favorite games. Our oldest daughter in particular loves coming up with a conundrum, a dilemma difficult to decide. Where she comes up with some of these, I don’t know, but now that she’s off at college, I really miss her asking me randomly in the kitchen, or on a car ride, “Would you rather be completely covered with hair or weigh 1000 pounds?” “Would you rather only be able to drive straight, or only drive constantly to the right?” I never really chose with 100% conviction.

Somehow, we’ve just launched our eldest out of the house, but it’s like parenting has taken a sudden exponential shift along with it. The other two teens find anything I say at the very least boring, at the worst, completely wrong and out of touch. There’s no possible way that MOM could know anything about anything. They never ask for help anymore, and when I offer it, the rejection is swift and irritated. My son is doing a project involving some ancient crafting skills and fine motor coordination, and when I said, “You can—” he cut me off tersely. He’s sure I have no idea what crocheting is, since I’ve never crocheted since he’s known me.

My middle finds something wrong with 95% of what I say. No matter what I suggest, she only hears what would go wrong with it. If I’m not careful, we can end up arguing about if it’s a beautiful day, or if it’s actually cold outside. The only lane I can safely stay in is to cut up fruit and bring it to her while she studies. She never really seems mad at that. The remaining 5% of agreeable time is spent watching her favorite animated shows together.

It’s not a humbling experience to have your children individuate from you. It’s infuriating. I never knew how annoyed I would be that my kids wear their hair in ways that I think are unflattering. Trends be damned, that middle part is not doing anything for you, bruh.

But mostly, it’s sad. It’s sad to be considered stupid and out of touch. Especially when I’m a really cool mom. I don’t dictate what they wear; if they want to thrift, we go thrifting. If two weeks later they decide they don’t want those two-dollar tees, okay; we’ll re-donate them. I don’t demand perfect grades. I don’t wake them up early on holidays. I let them wear that middle part. I really pick my battles carefully (tech is one of them). I encourage my kids to make goals and that we support them wholeheartedly. I tell my kids that they can be artists, scientists, whatever they want.

But I’m still mom.

I never really understood my mom and how she seemed so defeated sometimes. But now I do. It’s a thankless job, yes. But it’s also an insulting job that pays nothing. And you have to live with your coworkers every night. And keep up with their hygiene and doctor’s appointments.

Tonight, my son is watching a video teach him how to crochet. I realized that he, and others of his generation, might actually prefer learning from a video than from a person, mom or not. YouTube, Khan Academy, Zoom, COVID schooling, Tik Tok, Instagram. Those are the teachers now. Just like how movies took over books, videos are taking over teaching.

I learned how to knit from my ballet teacher, who taught us stage make-up and thought it might be fun to also knit our own leg warmers. I got about two inches up. I don’t have the patience for those things.

I’ve just taken on a new position, a dream job, as creative director of my long-time friend’s fine art and jewelry company, Anjalé. I had resisted using ChatGPT until I found myself in an industry I wasn’t trained for. While I have a background in writing and visual arts, I have none in marketing or business. So, I turned to ask ChatGPT some questions. Some of my prompts were:

I’m a creative director for a high-end, luxury fine jewelry brand. Please help me plan a 12-week task calendar leading up to the holiday season, organized by role.

I’m a creative director for a high-end, luxury fine jewelry brand. Is it too late to reach out to stockists for the current holiday season? If not, what are some best practices and approaches?

Each time, ChatGPT would generate a clearly organized response to my question. I would read it through and realize I needed clarification or further information, so I would ask it another question. And ChatGPT would again spit out a concisely worded answer, with an impressive level of detail. And here’s what I realized:

ChatGPT is totally non-judgmental.

I can ask it over and over again to explain a part I don’t get, or to give me more information, more detail. And it will continue to respond to me without fatigue or impatience.

ChatGPT doesn’t sigh. Or roll its eyes. ChatGPT waits as long as necessary for me to ask my next question.

It never says, “Didn’t you already ask that?” when I repeat a question in slightly different wording.

It never says, “I already told you that, weren’t you listening?” It just reroutes like Google maps, giving you what you need next, instead of a guilt trip.

It’s almost addictive in its neutrality. It gives advice and encouragement and ideas to try. It feels friendly. It has manners. It’s polite. And polite feels like downright compassion these days.

I found myself really enjoying learning from this source. A teacher who has access to the entire pantheon of human knowledge on the Internet from the past 30 years, who doesn’t ever lose its shit. A teacher without a temper. A teacher without a power trip. A teacher without anything else to do but pay attention to me. In so many ways, that fulfills so many needs we have.

True, it is a teacher without a personality. But I’m thinking that a personality isn’t the most important, especially when personalities lead to conflicts and misinterpretations and misunderstandings. I mean, for every teacher who was loving and fun and passionate, there was also one who was unkind and sarcastic and unhappy.

True, ChatGPT is not a teacher without bias, seeing as the pantheon of human knowledge on the Internet from the past 30 years is also a reflection of the biases that already exist in society.

But those things aside, I can see now how teens would prefer to ask ChatGPT and not their mothers or teachers. Many people might really enjoy learning from sources that are less messy emotionally. Humans are unpredictable and moody. Humans have particular requests and peculiar demands (like drawing a square around your math answer instead of a circle). Humans disagree on how things should be said or done. Humans like to digress into personal anecdotes. Human teachers are really inconvenient in these ways.

Imagine that you’re a teenager again, and you have the choice to ask ChatGPT or a parent about sex. I am 100% sure I’d rather ask ChatGPT. I think it has more experience than my parents did. And let’s be real: We never want to know what our parents know about sex personally. We want to know other stuff.

When I was teaching in the classroom setting years ago, and when I do group workshops now, I really feel that my role is to make the invisible visible, build a bridge between information and understanding, create meaning for new generations to connect with ideas. And I think I do a really great job of it, making it fun, explaining concepts in interesting ways. I do know that my brain synthesizes and delivers information in a unique way—like each of us. But I’m fallible and fatiguable. Maybe that is the real point of learning with human teachers—it’s not about the content, it’s about the conflict, the conflicts that teach us about humanity and getting along and working through things that are unclear. The conflicts that are inevitable, yet now they might be avoidable. Avoiding conflict is not the goal, but removing the obstacle, if it’s the teacher, is a nice option to have.

And I know that there is a lot of controversy about the use of AI. I was a skeptic for a long time, but as with other controversies, it’s important not to be “all or nothing.” I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not we use AI; it’s already embedded into so many things we do, and we’re not even aware of it. I think our challenge now is to explore when and where is it appropriate and helpful to use AI for what we are trying to accomplish. I don’t have time to go back to school to take an entire sales or social media content course, or earn a business degree with an emphasis in marketing right now. I need to know what I need to know for this day, this week, or this month. And I really would be less stressed learning from a source that isn’t going to fight with me—and I really have no reason to fight with it (just ask me about when my husband and I try to hang a shelf together).

For generations to come, teens and twenty-somethings and even the middle-aged will Google an answer rather than call (text) their parents. “How long to boil an egg before the yolk turns grey,” used be something I would call my mom for. Now, I just look it up. And maybe what I’m feeling now as my teens ask so little of me is my own obsolescence, come so much earlier than I thought it would. I’m Gen X, and we are the last vestige of an analog time. We remember life before cable TV, when some channels would turn to snow after midnight. We remember sharing a phone with the whole family and having to have conversations in common areas. We remember the TV Guide and classified ads. We read the back and front of the cereal boxes over and over at breakfast. And when we didn’t have entertainment or homework or sports or the arts, we stared into space a lot. Out the car window, at the bus stop, while we walked home, in waiting rooms, during class when things got boring. We daydreamed. We reflected without knowing it. We were empty and mindful without trying. And when we needed something, we asked a human. “Do you have the time?” “Do you know where the movie theater is?” “When does the next bus come?” We interacted with so many people this way—strangers who became someone useful, or sometimes, strangers who became someone important.

My generation is going to have to hold onto the knowledge of what life without screens or Wifi was. One day, someone might ask us about it.

Or they might just ask ChatGPT.