My mom asked me what AI looked like. Not what it could do first. Not whether it was dangerous. She just wanted to know what it looked like.
7 min read
"I could not exactly point to something and say, 'There. That is AI.' It does not really have a shape."
My mom asked me what AI looked like. Not what it could do first. Not whether it was dangerous. Not whether it was going to replace everybody. She wanted to know what it looked like.
Then she asked what it does. Then what it actually is. They were pretty reasonable questions.
The problem was that I realized I did not have a particularly good answer.
I use artificial intelligence regularly. I ask it questions. I use it to help me organize ideas, think through things, tighten writing, find information, and sometimes just get unstuck.
But explaining it to my 88-year-old mother was different.
It is not a robot sitting somewhere. It is not a machine with blinking lights waiting for someone to ask it a question. Most of the time, it just looks like a screen. Or a little box where you type words. Or a voice that answers back.
That last one was familiar to her.
My mother is visually impaired, so Siri is not some novelty she occasionally uses. Siri is part of how she navigates her phone and, in small ways, her day.
She asks Siri to make phone calls, set reminders, check the weather, answer questions, and do things that would be considerably more difficult if she had to find the right place on a screen she cannot see well.
She also talks to Siri. I don't just mean that she gives Siri commands. She talks to her. There is banter.
"Before long, my 88-year-old mother is having a small argument with her telephone."
So when she asked me what AI was, I realized something. She wasn't really as far removed from it as either of us thought.
"Siri is a kind of AI."
That gave her something she could understand. AI wasn't suddenly some mysterious machine being invented somewhere far away. A version of it was already sitting on the table beside her. She had been asking it questions for years. And occasionally giving it a piece of her mind.
Then I tried to explain what was different about the AI everyone seems to be talking about now. I told her that artificial intelligence is basically computer technology that has learned patterns from enormous amounts of information and can use those patterns to answer questions, make suggestions, recognize things, write things, and help people solve problems.
That sounded more complicated out loud than it did in my head. She looked at me. I kept trying.
I told her that when Siri understands what she says and figures out what she wants, technology is working behind the scenes. When her phone recognizes her voice. When it suggests a word. When junk email gets moved into the spam folder. When Netflix suggests something she might want to watch. She has been surrounded by versions of this technology for quite a while.
What is different now is what something like ChatGPT can do. I can type a question almost the same way I might ask another person. I can say, "Explain this to me." Or, "Help me think through this." Or, "Give me some ideas." And it answers.
Sometimes very well. Sometimes confidently and completely wrong, which is also a fairly human quality.
Siri can banter with my mother, but Siri does not know my mother. ChatGPT can help me think through something involving her, but it does not care about her. It doesn't worry about whether she is having a good day. It doesn't love anybody.
That distinction seems increasingly important. AI can process an extraordinary amount of information. It can recognize patterns. It can produce answers in seconds. It can help us do things that would have seemed almost impossible not very long ago.
It can be remarkably useful. But useful and human are not the same thing.
I think that may have been the part I most wanted her to understand. And maybe the part I needed to remember too.
My mother has watched the world change in ways that would have been nearly impossible to imagine when she was young. Telephones changed. Television changed. Cars changed. Medicine changed. Banking changed. The way we talk to one another changed. Now computers can talk back.
In her case, one already does. She has been talking to Siri long before I started talking to ChatGPT.
And perhaps there is something worth noticing in that.
We sometimes talk about older people and technology as though they are standing on one side of some great divide while the rest of us race ahead. But my mother has been adapting to new technology her entire life. At 88, she is still doing it.
She doesn't need to understand how artificial intelligence is built any more than she needs to understand what happens inside her telephone when she asks Siri to call me. She just wants to know what it is. What it does. And apparently, what it looks like.
I did my best with the first two. The last one was harder.
Fair enough. I told her, "Mostly, it looks like this."
And I showed her my phone.
Then I realized the irony of showing something to my visually impaired mother in an attempt to explain it.
Maybe that wasn't the answer at all. Maybe AI doesn't really look like anything.
Sometimes it appears as words on my screen. Sometimes it is working somewhere in the background. And sometimes it sounds like a familiar voice coming from the phone beside my mother. A voice she asks for help. A voice she talks back to. A voice she occasionally argues with.
AI is a tool. A powerful one. A strange one. And one we are all still trying to understand.
Even those of us explaining it.
And, apparently, those of us who have already been arguing with it for years.
— End —
