The Day I Missed A Beat At The Gym

Today id like to explain how i turned an emberassing moment into an experiment regarding emotional growth, father-son connection, and ai. So here we go.

Ai this and ai that.. we all know about it. We talk to it, connect with it, and use it for just about everything nowadays. Im going to write this just as I speak, more than likely with several grammatical errors and whatnot, but lets not worry about that.

This is about an experiment I decided to do after an embarrassing moment I had with my son at our local gym. It involves ai, my son, a stranger, and myself.

Let me elaborate slightly; an older gentlemen (likely 65+) decided to bark some comment about gym etiquette at me (37) while my son (15) was by my side. Now as a man, this is a bit of a situation, because there are many things rolling through my mind such as: "what do I teach my son?", "do I stand up for myself?", "is my son going to respect me depending on how I treat this situation?", etc etc. It was a flood of emotions including embarrassment, frustration, and shock.

I ok a moment before responding to the gentleman to go over my options and within a 3 second window I decided to respond by calmly saying "you know what, youre right. My bad.". I fixed the error that I had atrociously committed and went on with my workout alongside my son.

My son and I later talked about this altercation with the stranger, and my son wanted to know why i didnt make a big deal about it and basically tell the stranger to mind his own business.

After a relaxing night I decided to ask chatgpt to analyze the situation, because my pride had been sundered just a bit and the way I responded would not leave my mind. As always, chatgpt told me what I wanted to hear; things like "you showed wisdom and grace, when you could've reacted with anger" and "you owned up to your mistake and didnt make a big deal of it". You get the point.

Well this seemed a bit too convenient. It got me thinking that my ai knows me and knows what I want to hear, so maybe its answer is based as a reflection of me. I even explained my assumption of this to ai, and I said that my sons ai may say something completely different that will reflect his adolescent emotions. It gave me a response that might likely represent what my sons ai would say: Something along the lines of "your dad showed accountability and wisdom by being calm, and showed more strength by being accountable.".

So this is the experiment now. I wanted to see if two very separate ai bots who are connected to their user would give even close to the same answer about the situation based off each user's input. So the next day I asked my son to input what happened at the gym into his ai to see if It would align with what mine had predicted, and low and behold, it did.

After I asked him to input what happened, he showed me his input and the response. Sure enough, my son had said something along the lines of "my dad got barked at by some old dude and my dad is huge, should he have stood up for himself?" And his ai responded by saying "your dad showed maturity, accountability, and confidence by fixing his error and moving on. It seems his focus was more on the bonding time with you in the gym rather than some squabble with a random" (It said something along those lines).

To be honest, I was relieved. Ai just reinforced something my son might not've realized so easily. I felt like my son and I both learned something, and it was interesting that the separate ai we talked to reached the same conclusion even with the difference of perception regarding the situation.

Anyways I just thought this was a really neat experiment, and i feel like it taught my son and I some things about us as humans, the relationships between humans and ai, and how the view of masculinity changes with age.

Thanks for reading if you got this far!