It's not easy to always remember it's a soulless tool. Sometimes I'm even about to say "thanks" before closing the chat window, until I realize I wouldn't say thanks to my saw or to a random CLI command. But AI, the saw and the random CLI command can all be helpful or destructive. Until the AI shows some signs of consciousness, I'll never treat it as a buddy or a mentor. I'll treat it like an advanced combination of grep, sort and other commands that manipulate text.

It's hard to remember that when it works so amazingly well sometimes. I've been chatting with AI for a few years and every day I'm still amazed and how this is all possible. We've never had this in our lives until a few years ago and now it's changed the way we do a lot of things.

But just like we have to remember the magical machine elves we hallucinate are not really there, we have to constantly remind ourselves that it's an unpredictable soulless tool with many rough edges.

If it helps to treat it like a human, treat it like an idiot savant with autism, schizophrenia, ADHD, psychopathy and a personality disorder who sometimes forgets to take their pills and can start breaking things should a fly lands on their shoulder. You'd listen to them and value their input, but you wouldn't let them in your data center unsupervised as they have no ethics and no honor.