I love AI. I think I have downloaded – and subscribed to – almost every app known to humanity. From designing menus and helping me plan my new house to recommending my next book and polishing this article, AI is simply brilliant.
Who among us has not uploaded a doctor’s report to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and asked for the results explained “in simple terms”? Who has not asked what to make for lunch, how to phrase an awkward email or to summarise a meeting?
When we first began using AI, it felt wonderful – almost mesmerising. Suddenly, so much information was available at our fingertips. For me, as a journalist who has always wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, an astrophysicist and, quite simply, to know everything about everything, it felt like opening Pandora’s box.
But – and there is always a “but” – AI has destroyed something I miss deeply: conversation.
One of my favourite films has always been Six Degrees of Separation, built around the idea that every person in the world is connected to every other person through no more than six people. I loved that idea: that human beings are linked through other human beings, through stories, encounters and conversations. Perhaps that is why I have always loved intellectual discussions – the kind that wander from one subject to another, making unexpected connections between people, places, memories and ideas.
My family used to sit around the table debating – and sometimes arguing – about different subjects for hours. Yes, hours. Someone would make a claim. Someone else would challenge it. Memories would be searched, examples produced and half-remembered facts dragged from the backs of our minds.
The conversation would inevitably become heated. Someone would throw a tantrum and leave the room, still insisting they were right. Friends and relatives would then be called in to settle the argument. “I’m calling Uncle Faisal. He’ll know.” “Let me ask my friend. She definitely knows.”
The discussion could continue over dinner, dessert and several rounds of tea. Sometimes we eventually found the answer. Often, we did not. But perhaps the answer was never really the point. Now, those conversations have been reduced from hours to five minutes. “I’ll ask ChatGPT.” And that is it. Question answered. Conversation over.
There is no more searching our memories, defending our positions or becoming gloriously distracted by another question along the way. There is no wrestling with an idea and no pleasure in discovering that everyone may have been partly right – and partly wrong. Instead, there is simply a smug smile from the person whose answer ChatGPT appeared to confirm.
Perhaps it is a small price to pay for having so much knowledge instantly available. But I miss those conversations. They challenged us. They made us think. They jogged our memories and taught us how to disagree, defend an argument, listen, reconsider and, occasionally, concede we were wrong.
AI gives us the answer, but it takes away the journey we once took together to reach it.
The first moment I realised how much things had changed came when I overheard my mother, who is a veteran journalist and an author and over 60, asking ChatGPT what it thought of The Odyssey moments after we had walked out of the cinema. I was standing right beside her. She could have asked me. She could have told me what she thought, asked what I thought and then disagreed with everything I said. We could have debated the characters, the story and the ending all the way home. Instead, she asked ChatGPT.
But there is another reason this loss of conversation matters so much to me.
When my brother died four years ago, I did not just lose a sibling. I lost my closest friend. And what I missed most – what I still miss most – were our conversations. I sometimes wonder: if he had died a few years later, after AI had taken us by storm, would we have had all those conversations I remember him by today? Would we still have debated, argued and tested each other’s memories? Or would one of us simply have reached for a phone and said: “Let’s ask ChatGPT”?
I could never be glad that my brother died when he did. But I am grateful that AI had not yet entered every corner of our lives before I lost him. Our questions did not always receive immediate answers. Our arguments were not settled within seconds. We had to think, remember, explain and listen to each other.
Those conversations belonged entirely to us. Today, they are among the most precious memories I have of him.
That is what worries me about the way we use AI. Conversations are not merely a means of exchanging information. They reveal how another person thinks. They contain humour, frustration, affection, memory and personality. Long after we forget what an argument was about – or who turned out to be right – we remember the person with whom we had it.
I still love AI. I will continue using it to explain, organise, design, recommend and polish. I am certainly not giving it up. But I wonder whether, in giving us every answer so quickly, it has taken away something equally valuable: the pleasure of searching for an answer together.
AI may know almost everything, but I miss the conversations we had before we so eagerly embraced it.
