Today, ChatGPT helped me find specific poetic verses I hadn’t read in over 10 years and I thought lost forever. I only vaguely remembered the expression that captured my imagination so deeply, and the feeling those verses evoked.

I tried Google for one hour without success.
I tried Facebook, where I knew I posted those verses, for another hour, equally without success.
So, I turned to ChatGPT and, simply, described the expression I thought I remembered and how I felt reading those verses.

After a ten-minute interaction, ChatGPT found the work I was looking for and, without any aid, perfectly isolated the verses I so vaguely remembered (it turned out that my original suggestion was quite misleading).

But that’s not the most important thing.

The most important thing is that, after ChatGPT found those verses, I was so grateful that I felt compelled to do something completely unnecessary: I acknowledged it found the right verses. Enthusiastically.

I knew it was unnecessary and, usually, I never acknowledge its correct answers. And yet, this time, I felt the need to.

The relationship we build with AI has so many implications. For Google, for Facebook, for us.

—

The verses:

“…myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”

From Paradise Lost, Book IV
By John Milton