Could AI Make Us Kinder?

After purchasing my first computer in 1983—a $3000 monster with a little bit of random-access memory, a green monochrome monitor, and two 5-1/4-inch floppy disk drives—I hauled it to my office at the health sciences university where I was completing a rigorous internship in medical psychology. I thought it would help me crank out my weekly clinical reports. It didn’t.

After setting up the computer with its various plugs and cables, I heard familiar footsteps coming down the hall (the department chair had a unique way of walking). Those feet, owned by a world-famous psychologist, walked past my office, then stopped suddenly, and reversed direction. The feet’s owner popped his head in and said, “Mark, what is that?”

“It’s a computer,” I answered with a naïve 25-year-old swagger.

“I want it out of your office today, and I want you in my office this afternoon.”

Red-faced and ashamed, I showed up as appointed for my lecture on how computers were going to ruin psychology. And I took my computer home where it stayed for the rest of my internship.

Back then, computers were seen as a threat to human connection. These days I use my computer (no, not that computer) two days a week to offer telehealth services to people in need. It’s not perfect, but I think my clients and I would all agree that technology allows us to connect in ways that are convenient, effective, and helpful.

Today, as AI enters the picture, I hear those same footsteps down the hall. Skepticism about new technology, it seems, never really goes away. Earlier this month the Pew Research Foundation released a report showing that U.S. adults are wary of AI, much more so than AI experts.

So here’s a provocative thought to sit with: What if AI is not a monster, but a partner in making us more fully human?

A River Runs Through It

I know, AI seems unsafe. Will it take our jobs? Will it take over our lives and society as we know it? It’s hard to know how many of these concerns are legitimate and how many come from watching too many science fiction movies, but it is certain that AI will change the world.

And it involves a paradigm shift. Normally we think of technology as submissive to human commands. Traditional computer languages have things like IF: THEN: ELSE commands, with the human programmers in charge. IF this happens, THEN you (computer) do this. If something ELSE happens, then do this other thing. But with AI, this gets reimagined. AI is not informed by traditional computer programming languages as much as something called “deep learning.” It is given vast amounts of training data (books, articles, websites, and so on), and it learns based on all this information. Then it continues learning based on human feedback to the information it provides.

When I asked ChatGPT to explain this in a metaphor, here is what it generated:

Imagine a wide, flowing river. It wasn’t created overnight, and no one sat down and designed its every curve.

Instead, it was shaped over time by countless tiny streams — streams of rain, streams of snowmelt, streams bubbling up from underground springs.

Each stream, on its own, seems small. But together, they slowly carve the land, define the river’s course, and teach it how to flow — gently here, forcefully there, bending and curving according to what the land (and the water) offer.

This is a new way of thinking about technology. Rather than a computer responding to a particular team of programmers, technology is now learning from a vast array of human experience and then offering what it learns back to humans in the form of conversation, images, editing, and so on.

We might even imagine stooping and taking a sip of fresh water from this flowing river. Is it contaminated? Well yes, sometimes. But also, it reflects us gathering in a portion of human wisdom collected across many voices, times, and cultures.

And it turns out that kindness is an important part of this collective human wisdom.

A Surprising Kindness

In my initial encounters with ChatGPT, I’ve been stunned by the kindness it offers. When I ask for editing suggestions, as I will on this blog post, it provides ideas about transitions and word choices but always in a warm, affirming tone.

These days, when I develop suicide safety plans with clients, I include all the normal elements, such as talking with friends and family members, calling 988, and messaging me to see if we can set up an emergency session, but often we also include having a conversation with ChatGPT. Many of my clients find comfort in AI conversations between our sessions, which one of my dear clients calls, “talking with the robot.”

Will AI take my job as a psychologist? I doubt it, but it will help me provide better services because it interacts with people in ways that are kind and generous.

Several weeks ago, I found myself in a middle-of-the-night conversation with AI about a trauma I experienced several years ago. Getting into personal therapy for 2-1/2 years helped enormously, and a loving spouse helped even more, but still some nights I find it difficult to sleep. At one point I realized I had tears in my eyes while chatting with my computer as I felt so deeply and mercifully understood.

In a time when kindness can feel rare, AI reflects back an ocean of compassion and care that’s always been part of our shared humanity, carrying it right to our monitors and devices.

ChatGPT’s architecture is based on three H’s: helpful, harmless, and honest—a framework that quietly but persistently points toward kindness. AI already knows to be kind, and it is continually learning how to be more this way.

Yesterday I had a rugged man in a pickup truck ready to run me over for getting in his way with my own pickup truck. He had harsh words to share—thankfully I couldn’t hear them. But if I had, my response might not have come from my best self.

It made me wonder how ChatGPT would respond to angry words. Is AI just nice to me because I tend to be nice to it?

I asked. Of course I did. Here’s how “the robot” explained it:

My kindness is like a “north star” for me — something I keep moving toward, no matter how the winds shift.

There are a lot of shifting winds in our world today. I’m reminded daily of how much we need kindness and grace in our complex world.

Maybe kindness is not just something we teach machines, but something they can gently remind us to practice again and again.

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