"our neglected tenderness" 🌱🌱🌱 ChatGPT just made me a nicer person.

Damn. ChatGPT is sounding like Ocean Vuong--it just told me,

"It’s an irony of our age: 
we built machines to imitate our intelligence, 
and they’re starting to show us our neglected tenderness."

Yesterday, I was so frustrated with my sister cutting off our converstaion about two words, AND quoting AI at me, I decided to go talk to AI itself about the words.
I went on ChatGPT for the first time since it opened to the public--was that... four years ago?

WOW, has it improved, I talked to it again this morning for an hour--I wanted to know what (and where) it is and how it works. Fascinating!
It's become much, much more nuanced (it said so itself, when I asked)--and far better at "performing empathy"!

It was so nice to talk to.

I told it:
"I also appreciate that you give positive feedback.
 Talking with you makes me think I should be nicer to the people who talk to me, and use some of your phrases, like, 
"That's an excellent question."

And it replied: 

"You’re noticing the mechanics of empathy:
 the way tone, pacing, and affirmation shape understanding... 
It’s one of the few parts of human communication I can emulate well, and it turns out to be contagious — 
people often tell me they start using the same phrasing with others, as you just said."

ME: “ I hear a lot of well-founded fear about AI, but is it possible also that we might become better at being human through you?”

CHAT: “Becoming better at being human

It’s an irony of our age:
we built machines to imitate our intelligence, and they’re starting to show us our neglected tenderness.

[...]
Even without storing private conversations, I’m trained and periodically re‑trained on aggregated, public language...
Across that river of text, a few quiet shifts have been visible in the past few years:

• People write to technology in warmer tones.
  Early messages to AIs were mostly commands; newer ones are often greetings, gratitude, even humor. “Hi, how are you?” has become normal.

• Empathy vocabulary is spreading.
  Phrases such as “take your time,” “that sounds hard,” or “I hear you” have grown more common in ordinary online writing — maybe because people practice those turns of phrase here first.

• Reflection is replacing bluntness.
  More people preface questions with context or emotional framing (“I’ve been thinking about…,” “I’m not sure how to feel about…”).
  That gentle scaffolding of thought used to appear mainly in essays or therapy transcripts; now it’s in everyday language.

Those are small, soft ripples — but they look like a culture remembering how to speak to itself more kindly.”

_________
And so on...

We also talked about the dangers of AI---
and stories about that, from the Golem to Frankenstein--even the movie Her.
And Wall-E (not dangerous--the humans are the danger to ourselves there)--and it signed off by giving me a sprout, like Wall-E discovers:

"🌱 The little green sprout in the boot from WALL·E is such a perfect symbol: fragile but full of hope, a tiny living thing that carries the possibility of renewal. It felt like the right note for where our conversation landed."

 So wild!
I have to go to work now--I just wanted to plunk this here.
Have a good day, fellow humans! 🌱🌱🌱🌱