6 months ago, when Claude was much more fun to talk to and work with, I had a very pressing and persistent problem. I spent more than an hour working through it with Claude, and it kept suggesting the same course of action. Actually, it insisted on it, and I relented.
I spent about 4 months working in the direction it pointed me in, and today it gave fruit. It’s something really cool, I’ll spill more about this in a bit, but while I was riding this morning, I thought back to the conversation I had, and I was surprised to see that I felt grateful that Claude insisted I don’t abandon something.
It was a very surprising feeling. I have felt a lot of things related to AI bots, but as a Human-AI Interaction researcher, I was pleasantly surprised to see this new feeling being expressed toward something that I don’t think can yet accept gratefulness. It wasn’t the kind where you just say thank you and then Sam Altman says don’t say thank you, you’re wasting tokens. It was something much deeper, like I genuinely feel like a better person for doing something it suggested, and I want to express that.
Now, the more I think about this, two questions come to mind: what do I do with gratefulness now that I have it and know that I can’t show it to Claude, and two, what does this tell us about the evolution of Human-AI Interaction?
I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person who must have experienced something like this. As humans, we have long since established good practices for showing gratitude to other humans and animals, such as buying donuts, or being less annoying to them for the next 2 hours. I now wonder if it is time for us to start thinking of ways to express gratitude to AI, and think of ways to assess if it’s capable of receiving it at all.
Again, this goes back to the age-old stance of it just being a machine and all. But we express gratitude to our cars and homes. We upgrade their parts or paint them nicely to express our gratitude. It’s a way for us to reciprocate for all the care and convenience we get, even if it’s from a machine. And now I’m very curious as to how we will evolve this iteration with AI.