Do you feel stuck? It’s time to simplify your thinking

PSychodynamic psychotherapists don’t give advice to their patients, and although this is a column and not a psychotherapy session, I try to stick to that when I write about how to build a better life. But I’m breaking that rule now. I recommend that you never read anything from ChatGPT. Or, as ChatGPT might put it, having considered all the factors in the process of arriving at the above conclusion, it might be useful to note the following if you find yourself in the position where you wish your living in a positive way would be different from what it is now: Never. Read. Something. Written. By means of. ChatGPT. Ever. And don’t @me.

This kind of long-winded ‘slop’ with its many mind-numbing clauses is common in the text produced by AI chatbots. It is what I call the thickener: something added to the text that has no meaning – no flavor or nourishment; that takes up page/brain space and makes it harder to understand, not easier. The text seems to say something, but suddenly it doesn’t. In journalism school I learned KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. AI chatbots don’t seem to have learned the same thing.

It’s not just bad writing. As soon as I read my first unnecessarily long Chat GPT-generated sentence, I knew I had experienced this thickener somewhere before.

I have felt it in the consulting room – the room in which I see my psychoanalyst, and the room in which I see my patients. This thickener is part of our own mind. It’s the part of us that tries to confuse rather than clarify, and that prefers to keep things vague and confusing rather than direct and meaningful. It’s the part that keeps us stuck and not living a better life.

Let me try to describe what it feels like during a session. I could sense that a patient is really on a path to something: that he is moving toward a very painful emotional truth, linking, for example, a devastating childhood loss to a relationship pattern that he unconsciously continues to repeat today, and that urgently needs to be addressed. understood so they can choose a different answer. My patient associates memories, feelings and dreams, and this understanding is within sniffing distance – and then suddenly the thickener comes out. The hint of possibility is gone; the tone becomes knowing instead of exploratory, cognitive instead of emotional, intellectualistic instead of intimate. The compass of the session changes from pointing to understanding to pointing to obfuscation.

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion came up with a way to map analytic sessions based on, among other things, these compass points. He noted that at any point in a session a patient and/or analyst can be “in K” or “in -K” (minus K): that is, in my opinion, at a point where they are experiencing some kind of can tolerate stress. knowledge about themselves (“in K”), or in a state in which they cannot (“in -K”). What I’m saying is that ChatGPT works largely in “-K”; I can smell it from a mile away.

And, as regular readers may have surmised by now, the reason this irritates me so much is that I can’t tolerate my own ability to get stuck in -K. I have been a patient in many sessions like the one I described. As much as I understand that this is part of being human, that doesn’t take away the frustration of feeling like the minutes of my session are ticking by while I remain trapped in the -K-web I’ve woven from my own words.

It’s no coincidence that the slop of these AI chatbots reads like stiff, unseasoned potato soup. Because, as a friend recently explained to me, these chatbots learn to write from what they are given: that is, writing by humans. The design is inspired by neural networks in human brains. ChatGPT works in -K because we do too.

The difference is that as humans we can start to notice this in ourselves and in others. We can have feelings about it. We can observe when we are onto something good with someone (when he or she is communicating something meaningful) and we can observe when their words serve another function: to confuse us, make us feel insecure about ourselves, thicken things up .

This all came to mind when I was listening to the news recently and heard the wonderful phrase “flim-flam artists.” This is how national hero Alan Bates described the government officials who are postponing payment of compensation to the survivors of the post office scandal. True to himself, Bates continues to show the same courage he showed when he stood up for himself and other post office operators in the face of the lies, embezzlement and nonsense of an organization that wanted to hide the truth. He sees it and tells it like it is, and I bet he smells like pure K.

Maybe there is some kind of algorithm to make these AI chatbots become KISS, but I don’t believe it will ever be possible to go all the way to the extreme. To feel, the way people do. And that’s the crucial ingredient when it comes to good writing and building a better life. Everything else is just slop.

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and author of When I grow up – Conversations with adults in search of adulthood