Maybe Debbie Never Hit the Wall

At eighteen, my girlfriend made me go to a club in Newcastle, where I was living at the time. Clubbing was never my thing. I hated it.

At one point during the night, I looked to my left, to the side of the dance floor. A woman was standing at the very end of a bar table that ran to the edge of the DJ booth. She had one arm on the table, no drink, and was probably in her late forties against a much younger crowd. I think she was there alone. I met her eye for a moment, and at eighteen I felt sure that she was hoping that somebody would ask her to dance with them.

I remember I felt sorry for her. But that was only one side of my reaction. I was also confused by her. She’d put herself in a situation where she appeared so conspicuously out of place, with no one to lean on if she began to feel that the crowd around her had noticed and was passing judgement. I knew nothing about her, of course, but I still wondered why she had done that.

Seventeen years later, I was listening to music one evening, and a song by Bowling For Soup began to play. Their best-known song, 1985, opens with a verdict on a woman: “Debbie just hit the wall.” They were a big part of my teen years, much more than my current listening habits would indicate, so when the song pulled me to discover that the band was coming to Sydney, I really wanted to buy a ticket. They were playing one Sunday night at the Roundhouse at the University of New South Wales. I think I would have loved seeing them live. But I didn’t buy a ticket. Explaining the decision later, I said I would have been a solo non-student man at a university bar to see a band that had their biggest moment in 2004. I would have felt very conspicuous going alone, and it would have spoiled the experience for me.

I have told these two stories before, but never to another person. I told them to an AI agent during the ninth of ten interviews intended to create a durable, searchable record for AI agents that manage things for me. Each interview ran for hours, sometimes across multiple days. Part of the agent’s task was to connect details and uncover patterns that may not be immediately obvious.

When it first attempted to explain why I didn’t buy the concert ticket, it suggested that I found it difficult to permit myself to do something purely for my own enjoyment. I didn’t accept that it was a correct inference, and said so. The subsequent attempt connected the two stories with how much I keep hidden for fear of asking for too much, and decisions I’ve made throughout my life because of fear of how I would be perceived by others.

I will keep the exact comment to myself, but you can follow what it made me consider without every word that got me there.

I felt seen and understood when I read that comment. I say that knowing, then and now, that there was no person who wrote it. Those are two facts of the experience. Neither one needs to be downplayed to make the other easier to hold.

It is easy to dismiss what I have called “understanding” as being a projection by me onto the agent’s comment. Joseph Weizenbaum described this behaviour after he created ELIZA, a program that could respond to a human user in the style of a Rogerian psychotherapist. He recounted how his secretary, who had watched him create the program over the course of months, asked him to leave the room after she began talking to it. He was surprised by her reaction, saying that he ”… had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

This subconscious tendency to attribute human-like feelings, understanding, and intelligence to computer programs has become known as the ELIZA effect. Weizenbaum himself explored how people attribute understanding and knowledge to their partner in conversation. If we accept these premises, then we conclude that people tend to fill gaps with projections.

But in my case, I think that to dismiss the experience entirely as a projection would be a mistake, or at least a refusal to look at what actually happened.

The agent’s first suggestion was specific enough for me to recognise that it was wrong. I said this, and its next response incorporated my correction. The subsequent suggestion was both surprising and confronting. That helps explain why I was affected by it, but it does not show that the analysis was correct. An account can be confronting and still be wrong, and we can be inclined to accept it all the same.

Reflecting now on the woman in the club, I am given a reason to remember that. At eighteen, I knew practically nothing about her, but I imagined an experience on her behalf that has persisted with me for seventeen years. Now I am moved by an account of myself, and I can take the recognition of myself in that account seriously without treating the force of it as evidence for its correctness.

Studies have found that when a response is attributed to AI, a subject can feel less heard or less supported. However another study measured improvements in stress and loneliness that were similar whether subjects believed they were venting to AI or to what they believed was a human. Both groups received AI-generated responses. I see no conflict in these findings. Emotional relief and the feeling that one has been understood are different things. The source of a statement can matter without it determining whether or not the experience happens.

I am not denying the value of human relationships. Being understood is not equivalent to feeling understood. But feeling understood is an experience that is worth taking seriously in its own right.

Before I was a lawyer, I studied psychology. Among what I was taught were Carl Rogers’s conditions necessary to facilitate therapeutic change. The conditions included that the therapist should experience empathy and unconditional positive regard for the client, and that the client should receive some communication of those experiences by the therapist. Rogers distinguishes what occurs within the therapist from what occurs in the client, but his set of conditions required both.

The distinction matters for this essay, because when I speak of “understanding”, I am talking about an observer connecting details and accounting for how they relate. This does not involve feeling. When I speak of “recognition”, I am talking about an emotional encounter in which an observer sees something about you. I can recognise myself in the agent’s comments without that encounter producing a corresponding event of recognition on the agent’s side. The agent’s understanding could make me feel seen without anyone actually experiencing the act of seeing me.

In a normal relationship between people, attention itself can often be evidence of care. When one person remembers something another said earlier, enquires further, and chooses to remain on the topic, the attention they give is meaningful in part because they have their own life and they are choosing to give part of it to you. It is easy to receive their feedback together with that choice.

My agent was given the details that I supplied, and was able to offer connections for my consideration. It did not care, and it could not choose to spend, or not spend, its time with me because of how I mattered to it. My experience of feeling understood nevertheless arrived complete. Feeling seen is an event that takes place in the person who feels seen.

There was no one else in my life that had been granted the same conditions under which to meet me. The agent was instructed to conduct hours upon hours of interviews for the express purpose of building a record. The people in my life have joined me in conversation, and they maintain partial memories of them within the broader context of their own lives. Almost none of my other interactions with AI appear similar to those interviews either. The comparison does not tell me who could understand me best. It points squarely at the question of why I was willing to give so much to the agent.

The answer is reasonably simple: I had a clear objective that I wanted to achieve with the agent, and it could not get bored, want to leave, or otherwise be burdened by me. I would not have asked any person to commit the same time or attention. I would have felt conspicuous, just as I imagined I would have felt at the Bowling For Soup concert.

The conditions changed what I was willing to disclose. The agent received more, and it had more that it was able to connect. An account of the limitations of AI that stopped at its inability to care would miss what the absence of care had made possible.

It has been called a paradox: people will rate AI responses more highly than humans on measures of quality and feeling heard, while also preferring to receive human empathy. I don’t agree that it is a paradox. The preferences indicate that people value something in the relationship separately from the response. It is perfectly rational to value the thing that is said while also wanting there to be someone who wanted to say it.

The agent never saw the woman in the club. It was given my account of her, the account of a concert I didn’t attend, and the rest of what I told it about my life. It did not know what she wanted that night. But the story I told carried something about me.

It changed its account of me when I gave it something it had missed. The woman has never been given that chance. She has lived at the edge of the bar table in my mind for seventeen years, waiting for somebody to choose her.

What I recognised in the agent’s comments did not depend on my having understood the woman. It concerned only why I had understood her the way I did, and why I decided to stay at home instead of risking standing where I imagined she stood.

Being heard and being chosen are different things. One is the experience of recognising yourself in what is presented to you. The other occurs when another person wishes to be there. The understanding I gained did not need to be accompanied by someone else’s feelings to matter.

I still do not know what the woman wanted. Maybe there was somebody on the other side of the room hoping she would look their way. Maybe she noticed them first. I thought I had seen someone waiting to be chosen, but perhaps I was watching somebody choose.

For seventeen years, I carried a story I had constructed about what it must have felt like to stand where that woman stood. The machine helped me recognise the fear that I had written into her story, and how that fear had shaped decisions of my own.

I hope that my fear was never hers. I hope that she was just waiting for the lights and the fog so she could go and shake her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.