newyorker.com/culture/the-week…

An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention. [...] The assignment was simple: have a conversation with a chatbot about the history of attention, edit the text down to four pages, and turn it in. [...]

But nothing quite prepared me for office hours the following Monday, when a thoughtful young woman named Jordan dropped by; she’d been up late with her roommates, turning over the experience of the assignment, and wanted to talk.

For her, the exchange with the machine had felt like an existential watershed. She was struggling to put it into words. “It was something about the purity of the thinking,” she said. It was as if she had glimpsed a new kind of thought-feeling.

She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean?

She wasn’t sure, really. It had to do with the fact that the machine . . . wasn’t a person. And that meant she didn’t feel responsible for it in any way. And that, she said, felt . . . profoundly liberating.

We sat in silence.

She had said what she meant, and I was slowly seeing into her insight.

Like more young women than young men, she paid close attention to those around her—their moods, needs, unspoken cues. I have a daughter who’s configured similarly, and that has helped me to see beyond my own reflexive tendency to privilege analytic abstraction over human situations.

What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us.

“And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolute center of ethical life. But the sad thing is that we aren’t very good at this. The machines make it look easy.