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Is Chat Doing the Talking?
When AI translates every message, who is doing the talking? On love, belonging and the language you haven't learned yet.
In the South Park episode “Deep Learning” Stan uses ChatGPT to text his girlfriend Wendy. She loves the messages, but he can’t honestly answer her questions about them. It’s funny, because they’re kids and it seems quite innocent. It gets a lot more serious with adults, and with the pain and frustration of a second language you can’t use yet.
The adult version is real, and I keep seeing it among expats. They move to a new country and start a romantic relationship with someone local, but they haven’t learned the language yet. So they turn to ChatGPT and WhatsApp. They write in their native language, translate it with AI or Google Translate, paste it into WhatsApp, and hit send. The partner answers, the AI translates back. This is what I heard from two expats who moved to Uruguay and don’t speak Spanish yet. Two men dating two different Uruguayan women. And it happens to all kinds of people: men and women, queer and straight. In every case, everything they share is mediated by an AI and exists only as text.
So who is doing the talking?
I don’t judge any of this. It’s more human than having a romance with ChatGPT or Claude (and I don’t judge people who do that or are thinking about it either). But it’s not the depth of communication two human beings are capable of.
Before we sent and read text messages, we used to talk. Then came phone calls, voice messages, video calls. Every step brought something back: a voice, a tone, silences, a laugh, an expressive face.
So why would you settle for chatting when you can talk?
Why would you settle for a thin slice of the communication you could have with the people you love?
Communication is tied to belonging. It’s also tied to who you become anywhere in the world. In the country where you live, understanding a little of what people say when they speak is much better than understanding nothing at all. And being able to speak is not the same as being able to communicate what you feel, what you think, and what you actually want to say in the local language (especially in romance, though it matters in any relationship).
A recommended read
Sherry Turkle, a renowned author and researcher on relationships and technology, published her latest book today: Artificial Intimacy. I pre-ordered it in May and I’ve already started reading it. If you care about the future of your relationships, I recommend you get it too. Read it with this in mind: it’s not only how we change as humans when we start having more intimate conversations with AI. It’s also how our perception of other human beings changes, based on the expectations we build from our interactions with technology.
A question for you to consider:
Think of one significant relationship in your life: a friend, a relative, a partner. It can be in your first language or a second. What would be different between you if you could communicate in a richer way?