Privacy is dying since ChatGPT arrived. Now our obsession is for AI to know us as best as possible

For years we have learned to distrust. Not to share too much, to be suspicious of each clickof each form, of each extra permission that the mobile phone or some app asked us for. To frown.

Privacy was the last bastion of digital dignity, the ground we had to defend. But something has changed. And he has done it without resistance.

Since ChatGPT and company arrived, and especially since the projects and expanded memorywe have crossed an invisible line. We no longer just agree to hand over our data, we offer it proactively. What’s more, we get frustrated when AI doesn’t remember enough, or when it’s not able to quickly process a report or analytics. Or when it doesn’t anticipate what we want.

The paradox is brutal. We’ve gone from being outraged that Instagram showed us an overly personal and painfully targeted ad (shirts that camouflage lorzas, infertility treatments) to being impatient if ChatGPT doesn’t remember something we could use it to remember.

Of the “I don’t want to be tracked” to “why the hell don’t you know me better by now?” The difference comes from the perception of immediate usefulness: social platforms monetized our data by selling their access to third parties to segment ads, AI uses it to give us more useful answers. Or so we think.

The trick is in the illusion of reciprocity:

• When you provide information to a social network, you receive in return content that you did not ask for and advertisements that you do not want, no matter how accurate they may be.
• When you hand it over to an AI, you get personalized responses, assistance tailored to you, solutions that seem designed exclusively for your case.

In the second case, the transaction feels fair. Symmetrical. Even generous on the part of the machine. But the architecture of power has not changed. She has only become more seductive.

Now they don’t watch us, they understand us. And they don’t track us, but they remember us. Language matters, because it changes how we perceive what we are giving up. We have gone from being spied on to being cared for. And that makes a psychological difference, even though the end result is the same: handing over the entire map of who we are to entities we do not control.

Privacy is not dead. He is giving up due to exhaustion. Because defending something that makes our lives more difficult, that deprives us of comfort and efficiency, is unsustainable when the alternative promises to know us so well that it frees us from explaining ourselves over and over again.

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Featured image | Xataka