If We Don’t Develop These 4 Human Traits, ChatGPT Can Replace Us, Psychologists Say

ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot capable of generating humanlike responses to an unimaginable range of questions and prompts, has accumulated 100 million users in just two months, surpassing the growth rates of popular social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The bot’s amazing performances have elicited a wide range of reactions from critics and fans alike, from awe and admiration to concern and alarmist fears that even creative and skilled jobs may be destined to succumb to machine automation.

Among its many remarkable feats, ChatGPT can pass advanced university exams in law, medicine, and business; translate a picture of the contents of your fridge into a range of exciting recipes; produce an infinite number of essays, poems, and articles (though not, we promise, this one); and translate the picture of a handwritten website sketch into the full code needed to create it. Needless to say, all of these and other achievements occur in just a few seconds.

As psychologists, our primary interest in ChatGPT, AI, and indeed any technology, centers around their human impact, including their potential to change and reshape how we think, work, and live. As Pamela Pavliscak noted, “We design tech and tech, in turn, designs us.”

With the debut of highly versatile, viral, and pervasive technology as ChatGPT, we are bound to uncover consequential repercussions on how humans behave. As illustrated in I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, AI-induced changes aren’t always about generating new human behaviors, but rather, revealing, amplifying, or augmenting existing human beliefs, habits, and adaptations.

For example, much of the pushback against ChatGPT reveals the human inability to accept that something could be smarter than us, even when that thing is our own creation, and thus a natural—okay, artificial—extension of our own intelligence.