What Did The Doorman Say To ChatGPT?

A few weeks ago, my friend Asad asked me how I was feeling about chatGPT. 

I’ve talked about it before but given how fast the landscape is changing, I want to expand further:

How I feel about chatGPT is complicated.

The short answer is: From a business and writing point of view, it’s great. But from a cultural and social lens, it’s terrible.

Because of the length of my answer, I will address this in a 2-part email. Starting with my former answer explored in this email.

Given how fast AI technology is moving, soon we will be able to create video, text and images that are indistinguishable from reality to the uninformed eye. 

What that means is we’re about to enter the golden supreme era of misinformation (like we already don’t live in it).

I rendered this image in Midjourney Version 5. At a quick glance, this looks realistic

Prompted by either humans or AI, the online world will become an even bigger ocean of content for our consumptive brains to drown in. As a consequence, we won’t be able to tell the difference between misinformation and disinformation (misinformation designed to deceive).

We already struggle to do so, but digital media will become a bigger battle to evaluate what is true or false, useful or useless, real or fake. 

Despite the incoming tsunami of mediocrity, this is good news for my business and writing. Let me explain.

I’m part of a writing community called Foster. (They’re about to kick start their Season 3 workshop with a focus on an artisanal approach to writing. Aspiring writers, go check them out!) Foster has always placed an emphasis on writing your truth and personal perspective. And because of this, their collective influence has largely shaped my writing principles: live, get yourself into trouble and then write about it.

The way I see it in this age of AI, my personal human insight will become more valuable.

Of course, the idea that automated, efficient and robotic systems will cause personal human-made goods to go up in value is nothing new. 

In his book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland talks about the doorman fallacy. The idea behind it is that it’s a fallacy to mistake the function of a doorman at a five-star hotel as just a door opener and closer.

If that simple function of a doorman is true, then technocratic efficiency logical nerds (such as economists, engineers, and consultants) will tell you to fire the doorman and install an automatic door opener. That way, you can save money and boost the bottom line.

But what happens is guests become less satisfied, and the hotel begins to decline. This is because the doorman is more than just a door opener. He performs a whole host of human roles: he signifies status, greets guests and assists them with checking in, keeps the lobby orderly and traffic clear, and he provides security. 

Yet the consultant who recommended letting go of the doorman and installing an automatic door would consider their cost-saving tactic as a successful boost to the bottom line. 

But just as an automatic door doesn’t replace a doorman, an automatic text generator does not replace a writer. When human connection, insight and ideas become scarce – artists will become more valuable. 

In Alchemy, Rory makes another important point – humans value the effort put into something more than the purely logical function.

From my years at the poker table, I’ve witnessed firsthand how humans aren’t logical creatures. We are psycho-logical.

Rory Sutherland writes, “Logic is what makes a successful engineer or mathematician, but psycho-logic is what has made us a successful breed of monkey, that has survived and flourished over time. This alternative logic emerges from a parallel operating system within the human mind, which often operates unconsciously, and is far more powerful and pervasive than you realise.”

You see psycho-logic at play in bread. The process of making bread has been commercialised at a mass scale. You can pick up a loaf of bread for cheap. Yet there are people who are willing to pay up to 5 times the amount for artisanal sourdough bread. That’s psycho-logic.

Choosing sourdough bread makes no sense at all. But our decision-making skills haven’t been designed to choose what is optimal; it has evolved to be useful. The fact that we aren’t Spock allows for “magic” to exist. 

Here’s an example of “magic” in play.

On my desk sits a thick white envelope. It contains a wedding invitation from my cousin, requesting that I fly out to Manila for his wedding. 

The invite is printed on a fancy grainy card with beautiful typography, wrapped in see-through tissue paper, and sealed with a sticker containing my cousin’s and his fiancé’s initials in gold letters. I’m sure it was very expensive to produce. To top it all off, he even hand-delivered it to me. 

I don’t have much of a relationship with my cousin. In fact, I’ve not spoken to him in over 10 years, but after receiving this hand-delivered wedding invite, I almost booked a flight to Manila. 

If he had sent me a text — which would’ve been more efficient and saved time and cost — I wouldn’t have taken his request seriously. The message would’ve lost all meaning and significance. 

As Rory Sutherland once said, “The meaning and significance we attach to something is felt in direct proportion to the expense with which it is communicated.” In other words, the costliness carries meaning. 

Thinking AI images will replace paintings, images, and writing is like thinking email will replace sending physical wedding invitations. 

We send expensive wedding invitations to signal to other humans that it is an important event. My cousin’s card signals to me that this is something worth paying to. 

Art and writing will go the same way. We, humans, don’t want to connect with machines – we want to connect with other humans. And this will drive more of us to seek those people with personal and verifiable human insights. 

Because in this new AI era, where else are you going to hear from a single 31-year-old, British-born Vietnamese tiger cub, former high stakes poker player turned writer, reader, climber, arm-chair behavioural scientist and advertising man?