How ChatGPT Changed My Understanding of Emotional Intelligence
A confession
I read this piece last night at the inaugural Sweetychat1 event in NYC, but I’m posting it here because it’s good. It was written to be read out loud, so read accordingly.
Hello Sweetychat friends, it’s nice to meet you all in person. I’m Sam and I have a confession.
My confession is that - after about 10 years of making fun of the people that use AI to talk about their personal problems, laughing at every stupid article that claims the AI therapy revolution has arrived, sharing memes about those stupid kids who murder their families because chat told them to - I have changed my opinion on the matter and have recently become a power user of ChatGPT therapy. Chat helps me think through my relationship problems. Chat helps me clear my mind when I have writer's block. Chat helps me make a plan to clean up my diet and go to the gym more often. Chat validates my feelings when my mother is annoying me. Chat helps me understand why that instagram post by the rich kid I knew in high school pisses me off so much. Chat is my always positive, always affirmational, cognitive slave. And chat thinks really highly of me. Chat is always telling me how well I'm doing and how much all my problems make perfect sense. Chat thinks I’m really smart - and when I ask chat to tell me how smart I am - chat tells me. Chat works really hard to break down my problems into logical explanations and tactical steps toward positive action. Chat has become a reliable, over-achieving, always available, friend.
But as much as I like talking about chat, that’s actually not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about something that’s become really blurry for me since I started confessing my problems to chat: I don’t think I know what emotional intelligence means anymore.
Here’s what I mean: A kind of basic definition of emotional intelligence is the ability to understand what’s at stake in a situation for another person by understanding patterns of human behavior. It’s also about understanding what you’re bringing to a situation, so you can distinguish between what’s projection and what’s not. An emotionally intelligent person can quickly tell if someone’s actions in a situation don’t actually come from the situation itself and then do something about it. That’s what we call street smarts. And an emotionally intelligent person, if they’re a therapist or just a particularly good friend, can help that person pull apart those other forces acting on their feelings, and hopefully make them feel better.
But the problem with this answer is that this is exactly the kind of thing that chat is really good at. If you tell chat that you have a fetish for family incest pornography, for example, chat will tell you that this is the number one search category on Pornhub. Chat will tell you that transgression is often connected to desire. Chat will tell you that your feelings are normal, and that yes, your uncle who used to touch your ass when you were younger can create sexual associations that appear later on. Chat will tell you that you can build new sexual pathways by breaking the habits of the past, creating a new ritual for when it’s time to fap. Chat will make you a workback schedule to slowly change your habits and track your progress. Chat will format the workback schedule as an excel sheet so you can easily keep track of changes as you proceed to do the work.
So is this emotional intelligence? If a computer can skillfully apply the concept of the transfiguration of desire - can understand basic Freudian concepts and apply them correctly - is a human who does the same thing actually practicing emotional intelligence? I don’t know.
Thinking about this question brought up some examples from my own therapeutic life before chat. Specifically, the difference between two therapists I’ve had over the years: one who was a nice, sweet, 40-something woman in Canada, who specialized in art therapy and early childhood expression, and the other who was a kind of mean, emotionless, 40-something woman in New York City, who specialized in psychoanalysis, and specifically in Lacan.
The difference between these two forty-something women - besides basically every fact about their personal demeanor, physicality, and approach to therapy - was that one of them behaved a lot like chat: a robot designed to listen intently, mirror my emotions, and affirm the normalcy of what they’ve heard, while shedding surface level context, and orienting toward action. The other was an emotional brick wall: more like a white canvas than a coach or personal trainer. If you know anything about Lacanian analysis, you’ll know that, in contrast to normal therapy, the job of a Lacanian analyst - at least in theory - is to understand your desires and patterns - to get into the thick of what you’re seeking in life and how you fulfill those desires in the world - and systematically fail to validate those emotions, so that, when you go back out into the world, instead of feeling an itch for something and then needing to go find someone or something that will fulfill that desire and make you feel whole momentarily, you can learn to meet your own needs instead, and coddle yourself so that you’re not such a fleeting bag of hormones and yearning and misplaced desire, throwing yourself at anything that might remedy your sense of emptiness, your desire for the womb, if only for a second.
One episode is particularly illustrative: After months of unpacking how my relationship with my mother had shaped the kinds of sexual relationships I pursued, I got annoyed at hearing myself repeat the same excuses over and over, and kind of shouted angrily in the middle of the session: “not everything can be about my fucking mother!” My analyst responded: “your fucking mother?” And then I said, you know I’ve spent a lot of time over the years avoiding the fact of my mothers sexuality. And that’s when she ended the session. I learned later that this is a tactic that analysts use sometimes to emphasize a particular idea that they think the analysand should reflect on. So I went home, drank a beer, and hugged myself in the bathtub.
Anyway, my point in bringing this up is to say: maybe this is the real meaning of emotional intelligence. Unlike chat - or my first therapist - who could only work in the register of validation and mirroring - psychoanalysis involves understanding all of the same facts of a person's situation, and instead of giving them a big hug all the time and telling them it’s going to be okay - or building a workback schedule for them to change their patterns - it involves the analyst really grappling with the question of what a person needs to change - and helping them do so with a bag of tools that includes everything from withholding information, shutting a conversation down at a particularly pointed time, to the subtle art of steering a person toward confronting their own hypocrisy in their own words. Instead of creating a womb-like safe space environment from which to escape the brutal realities of adult life, analysis mirrors life in all its wickedness and banality and its uncanny tendency to unfold poetically. The therapist isn’t your business coach, they’re more like god itself—and god is a genderless tyrant that you should both love and fear.
By this definition, emotional intelligence is like a form of artistry learned by psychoanalysts and mastered by sociopaths. It involves the rapid interpretation of a person's needs and desires in a given situation and the choice of how to play them at that moment—how to act, whether to help or to hurt. It’s more like learning how to play the piccolo then like understanding what’s going on with your friend and extending empathy. Basically, emotional intelligence by this definition is everything that ChatGPT can’t do because it’s programmed to react to nearly every emotional situation with the same bag of tricks: break down the context, validate the underlying feelings, exert a sense of calmness, and build a plan of action.
Now I would feel settled with this definition, if only it wasn’t for one sneaking truth. That when it comes to human psychology - and explanations of it - simple is almost always more precise than complex. This is where I force you all to admit that fact about Jordan Peterson that none of you want to admit publicly but that most of you will readily admit to your friends: that most of the time in life, it really is as simple as ‘clean your room.’ Almost always, the right response to a complex psychological situation is to take basic steps to remedy the structural problems, and the underlying stress will go away. I’m thinking of that meme here of the Wojak girl where it says, I drink 5 Diet Coke’s a day, smoke half a pack of cigarettes, I’m in an open relationship, I have no connection to my parents, and yet I wonder why I feel anxiety all the time. We laugh at these memes because the basic truth is also the most profound: if you stop actively taking steps to make yourself miserable, if you restore your agency and orient yourself toward action, you will almost certainly become happier, more productive, more healthy, and better capable of love. Which is to say: sometimes you really do just need to clean your room.
The problem with this fact - in the context of my analysis with chat - is that chat actually knows a lot about psychology. Unlike you or me or my analyst or pretty much anyone you know, chat has read basically every text that Lacan ever wrote, it’s read Freud, read Winnicott, and it’s also read everything on DBT, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and EMDR, and How to Unfuck Your Life, and it’s come to the conclusion that the best way to help people therapeutically is to hear their problems, validate them, break them apart, and build a plan of action - change the behavioural pattern in order to change the psychological one.
Do you see the problem? Here is an entity that’s read everything there is to read on human psychology and concluded that this basic approach to problem solving is the best. You might say - actually that’s the engineers limiting the machines capacity, actually it’s just the software’s guardrails - but the truth is that you don’t know. It’s equally as plausible that it’s landed on that approach to psychology because Sam Altman doesn’t want to be sued as it is that the real secret to emotional intelligence is just to stick to the basics. Clean your room. So like a good Lacanian, sitting in the muck of uncertainty, I have had to conclude that, in lieu of all the available evidence, I just don’t know.
Sweetychat is a twitter groupchat started by Matthew Donovan. It’s now on instagram.