To evoke is the deliberate act of calling something into being, in another’s mind.
By telling a story or performing an act we tingle sensations and conjure images; making people remember that feeling or simply the quiet confirmation of being heard. This morning I used AI and then reflected I was “not feeling alone in my own head”; capturing what I believe to be our basic hunger. Using AI can help us rehearse, refine, and receive experiential signals that satisfy our need to feel not alone.
The basic human hunger AI has the potential to address
Headlines prefer spectacle. Mainstream narrative about AI and relationships often reduces the story to titillation: chatbot romances and alarming anecdotes.
“We’ve already heard… clickbaity articles about how there [are] AI… dating sites and things of that nature,”
These are the titillating parts of this story; but not the parts that interest me most. These stories are clickable because they are extreme; they distill fear and fascination into tidy headlines. The deeper and more optimistic effect is quieter and more social: AI offers a new channel for companionship for …
—> the simple, human act of evoking recognition in another mind.
Social media’s rise teaches us why this matters.
“Why did social media capture our attention…?
Because it’s given us an opportunity in real time to connect with other humans and evoke. We have learned to act and accept partial feedback from other humans: a view, a heart, a brief comment. Our interior life has disconnected from others. We don’t necessarily even want to know what people are thinking. We want to know they’re listening. And that listening need not be exhaustive to be meaningful. It’s a partial feedback loop where my evoking resulted in an acknowledgement of receipt. That acknowledgement is often enough; it’s the difference between feeling solipsistic and feeling witnessed.
AI amplifies …
that currency of acknowledgment. For people who struggle with loneliness or depression, the difference between being trapped in thought and having a responsive thought-partner is vast. AI can “fill that need for you” by reflecting language back, naming emotions, or helping parse an insight. Fear mongers tend to reduce to therapy-by-proxy but a more constructive view is that it can be a rehearsal of sorts; a way to reinforce my understanding of myself.
AI has been serving as my emotional gym: a place where I can practice phrasing, test metaphors, fine-tune verbalized gestures that might evoke others.
Yes the power is double-edged. I acknowledge the dark counterexamples. Sad situations when people have received incendiary advice from an AI tool and gone on to commit suicide. I believe these outliers preoccupy our mind share as do the rare murders and catastrophic cases of fraud that dominate headlines. I think the median use case is different: people seeking to be heard, to practice evocation, to scaffold their interior lives. Our ethical imperative might be to minimize harm while preserving the technology’s capacity to help people feel less alone?
Imagine a world where AI is used to rehearse language that matters to you. What metaphors land best with your character and lived experience? How might you take those rehearsed gestures and bring them into human relationships? Perhaps your feedback loop might become richer and less messy.
The goal is to reinforce our understanding of ourselves. This in turn will enable us to evoke real humans with more skill as we en masse experience fewer purely human interactions going forward.
Evocation is an ethical act
And therefore any tool that helps us evoke with skill can be used ethically.
AI doesn’t replace human companionship and it won’t doom us to solitude either. Some people eat too much salt and they might OD on AI as well. Used well AI gives us a new practice field to know ourselves and make others feel known.
What a time to be alive.
