Word of the Day: Dry-Chatting
I'll have my AI email your AI.
Dry-Chatting is when people test out a difficult discussion in advance by chatting with an AI.
“Dry-chatting” with an AI companion before a difficult situation has many benefits. It lowers emotional intensity through distraction. It helps you process feelings by putting them into words. It gives you a sense of social reassurance. And it delays exposure to the threatening situation, long enough for you to regain composure.
This is at the edge of the modern trend of using AI to read and write your emails, which leads to the almost comical image of people sending and receiving emails back and forth without even actually reading them, leaving it to the ‘bots.
via marketoonist
from the newshole:
There is some reported benefit to “ dry-chatting ” with AI—practicing tricky topics with a bot first so you can tackle the issue directly and clearly with someone afterward. Used as rehearsal, AI can be an effective tool in building confidence.
But when used as a substitute, it does the opposite. Filling the gap entirely, with one person’s ChatGPT effectively talking to another person’s Claude, can create distance. This runs counter to what companies say they want when bringing colleagues back into the office: creativity, collaboration, and stronger working relationships.
Let’s say this was a useful practice and had no downsides. What is it worth to a business? At $20 a month, maybe it’s not worth thinking about. At $200 (still not actual cost), the CFO might start asking questions.
It’s actually displacing the conversations you have with colleagues, which is how relationships get built. But companies don’t value that because they don’t prioritise it or allow time for it. The likelihood is that they squeeze both, and performance suffers.