A while ago I spent several days compulsively chatting to ChatGPT telling it my views about books, films and history and getting it to validate them. These are the kinds of topics about which I would start reading page after Wikipedia page and fall down a rabbit hole, endlessly following links and getting a kick out of mindlessly consuming largely unimportant details. ChatGPT is much worse because you can’t run out of stuff to read even on the most obscure topic. You can simply continue requesting it to generate more junk.
If you have tendency to talk a lot, the interactivity can be incredibly addictive. It also provides the illusion of activity as you find yourself relentlessly typing and revising your requests. What makes the conversations particularly unstoppable is not only that ChatGPT never gets bored listening to you and is able to talk about any topic but it can tell you exactly what you want to hear. Often I have disagreed with the perspectives of others about books, films or historical incidents and found a distinct lack of alternative views. That can’t happen any longer.
Instead of asking it to tell you about a topic e.g.
Why is World War II considered a just and necessary war even though one of the Allied leaders, Stalin, was a brutal dictator?
and find that it has summarised all the conventional arguments about the need for compromise in the fight against the Nazis, ask it a leading question:
In what ways was the idea that WWII was just and necessary undermined by the alliance with Stalin?
Better still instruct it:
Write an article arguing that the moral victory of the Allied Forces was compromised by the fact that one of the leaders was himself a brutal dictator.
Then play around for a while with the wording to get exactly the opinionated answer you desire.
The streams of consciousness that emerge over the course of a long interaction with ChatGPT give rise to an experience that is like a combination of browsing, infinite scrolling and texting incessantly. All the addictive power of the internet, mobile and social media is concentrated in a single application. Like digital media addiction, it is challenging to control. Similar to the internet, ChatGPT can be useful as well as distracting making it difficult to enforce boundaries.
However I wonder if ChatGPT itself might be able to help. The problem with most tools and strategies to limit internet addiction is that they assume that the problem is with certain websites like social media websites. In my experience, browsing (my term for digital addiction in all its forms) is fairly content-independent. Almost any page or app is potentially browsable.
I have only found two methods to ever work
- Cold turkey – temporary and difficult to maintain
- Intrinsic motivation to do something worthwhile which kills off any desire to browse – long-lasting and almost effortless The latter appears to be a clear winner and it is indeed by far the most effective method. But for it to work the right initial conditions are required. You need to get started with a motivating task first thing in the morning. Once you have been browsing for a little while (maybe only 15 mins), it is near impossible to snap out even when you are fully aware that you are wasting time and desperately want to do something else.
You need a kind of early warning system and that is where ChatGPT could help. The model could be fine-tuned to detect when you have started to go into browsing mode and warn you of it. I have often thought of doing this with my internet use by trying to detect potentially risky behaviour from a dataset comprising time spent on different sites. I think it might be easier to do that with ChatGPT conversation history compared to browsing history since it is fairly straightforward to identify the places when I have started to chat addictively.
I must confess I have not quite worked out how exactly I would go about doing this nor do I think it likely I will build anything1. Nevertheless I am sharing the thoughts I wrote down sometime back2 to bring attention to an under-explored downside of large conversational models like ChatGPT along with proposed strategies to address the problem in case they are of interest to someone else.
- It is the dilemma that faces the unmotivated and indisciplined when seeking to develop solutions that address issues like accountability, productivity and time management, a topic that deserves its own essay. ↩
- If I have ceased to engage in this particular form of addictive behaviour it is only because I am occupied by other diversions. ↩