I use large language models the way some people use long walks. I hand it a tangled thing, and we take it apart slowly, and somewhere in the "taking-apart" I learn what I actually think. The model is patient, asks the next question, and doesn't think I'm an idiot. Patience, it turns out, is most of the job!

Originally, my conversations with these models helped me think through systems and second- and third-order effects. Eventually, these models helped me prepare for challenging conversations I needed to have with other people.

From all of my interactions, one thing is obvious: talking a thing through with a model is not the same as facing the person. The hard conversations with the most riding on them are the ones nobody rehearses.

Here's what I think is coming…

  • You describe a scenario: the person, the history, and the hard conversation that needs to happen.
  • A harness takes it all and builds a custom simulator. Not a generic person; the specific one, assembled from what you know. A handful of photographs becomes a face. Sixty seconds of audio becomes a real voice with emotion.
  • A VR headset puts you in the room. The face looks back. It interrupts.
  • You say the thing badly. You learn. You say it again.

Therapists have done a version of this for decades, with role-play and couches. What changes is fidelity, repetition, and branching. A simulation will do the fortieth iteration with the same attention as the first. A simulation will push back: it will make you run the take where they cry, the take where they go cold, the take where they get up and leave.

A VR headset probably isn't a requirement. Some conversations aren't a "problem of palabras." They are a problem of standing still while something painful happens, and trusting that you will still be there afterward. If you are the kind of person who registers another person's hurt before they've said something, the rehearsal isn't the script. It's intentionally sitting inside the feeling ahead of time. That is a small thing to build, and not a small thing to have.

Of course, none of the above truly replaces the person.

The person will say the sentence no model hallucinated, which is the entire reason to sit down and have the conversation.