Seth Godin: preference

Transcript context

…How happy are you with your own bot of you, the Seth bot? That’s personification. You created it. Now you’re immortal in a sense. Does that feel good, or you’re scared? I worked hard with the WordPress folks, the Automattic folks, on the bot. The first thing I did was, I made it so it would never use the pronoun I. If it does, that’s a bug. It doesn’t say I think this and I think that. It says, Seth wrote about this and he said so and so, and then it gives links. What I like about it is that it is, in and of itself, very clear about what it’s good at, and it doesn’t pretend that it is me because it’s not me. I just had a call yesterday with a really big, famous tech company, and they’re talking about bringing out a bot that does none of those things. That’s basically an engineering gimmick that will trick a whole bunch of people into thinking it’s smart, but after you poke it twice, all the air comes out of the balloon. I think that’s a huge mistake. What we need to do, no matter what we market, no matter what opportunity we bring people, is make it fit in the box in which it is contained. Go to the edges, but don’t imagine that pretending it’s bigger than those edges is going to last because it won’t. Will there be an open-source bot — a bit like the Sydney character that was part of ChatGPT for a while before they neutered it — that everyone will just talk to, maybe for many hours? Maybe only 10 percent of the population, but they’ll have some kind of emotional relationship with the thing.…

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