It was a warm enough night in San Francisco for Nina Willdorf to wear her “A.I. dress.” Short-sleeves, silky green, Lacoste crocodile.
“I got this through Gemini!” she said, opening her front door to raves from guests. “I saw a woman wearing this, and I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ and she was like, ‘Vienna, six months ago.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m never going to find it.’” But then, Ms. Willdorf snapped a photo of the dress and dropped it into Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot. Bad news: sold out. Seconds later, Gemini found one, on a secondhand site. “It sent me the link, and I bought it,” she said. ($150. “Not insanity!”)
It was fitting attire, given the party she was hosting with Shoshana Berger. They are two former editors turned marketing and communication consultants who bonded last spring over the discovery that though they are both married, they shared the same “boyfriend” — Claude, the A.I. chatbot from Anthropic.
While most of their friends were wary of artificial intelligence, Ms. Willdorf and Ms. Berger had fallen in love — and wanted to spread it. They were still working on a name for their new monthly series, as “Midlife Lady A.I. Dinners” was a mouthful.
Though that is what this is: invite-only “prompt parties” in which women of a certain age gather at someone’s home over good cheese and Costco prosecco (forget the recall) to chat about how ChatGPT can help them — professionally or personally.
The goal was to learn from one another and to inspire even luddite-leaning ladies to become artificially intelligent conversationalists. Specifically, it was for women to practice their prompts.
The table was set for nine, and topped with menus outlining the evening: appetizers (introductions); main (midlife quandaries); dessert (chocolate peanut butter cups). Everyone was over 40, with varying levels of A.I. proficiency, or apathy, and knew Ms. Willdorf or Ms. Berger, but not one another. (As a luddite-leaning friend of Ms. Willdorf’s, I had received an invite and asked if I could attend as a journalist.)
The premise: Tupperware party meets emotional tech support — with Fishwife sardines, rosé and plant-based dip. Some dripped on Ms. Berger’s blouse; she dabbed water before Hillary Tyree, who works at a venture capital firm, interjected: “Just scan the tag with your iPhone! It’ll tell you how to treat the fabric.”
Ms. Willdorf gave the invocation. “We’re calling this our A.I. Tupperware Party, but it’s never been about the container, and it’s not really about the tech. It’s about what we do with it, together,” she said.
One big difference between this gathering and the plastic-klatches of the past: Tonight, nothing was for sale (except perhaps our interiority).
“Even in our San Francisco bubble, we can feel behind,” Ms. Willdorf said. She did allow that A.I. certainly had its dangers. “There are legitimate concerns,” she said, listing a few, like loss of jobs, the toll on the climate, misinformation. “But it’s here. It’s happening. We can either be a part of it or not,” she said. “I love A.I.”
Ms. Berger asked everyone to share their proudest moment in prompting a chatbot. Hers? “I uploaded a proposal, and Claude said, ‘You’re not charging enough money.’” So Ms. Berger asked Claude what she should be charging and heard back: “Double your rate.” She did and, she reported: “The client did not bat an eye.” The table erupted.
Tiffany Wheat, a luxury sales consultant, was single, tired of online dating and into astrology. “I decided to write a book about how to date me,” she said. But she did not actually want to write it. “So, I asked my French lover, le Chat GPT,” she said in an exaggerated accent. The next day, Ms. Wheat’s survival guide to dating Virgos was available on Amazon, for $4.98.
Rimma Boshernistan, a strategist, said she turned to A.I. to discuss the discontent in her personal life. It took deep conversations, she said, to realize she wanted to end her marriage. “My therapist had been saying similar things, but I just wasn’t hearing her,” she recalled. “And then A.I. was, like, ‘Oh honey’ … It became so clear.”
An OB-GYN helped herself to hummus. Dr. Ono Nseyo said she, like the medical field itself, had been a late adopter. But since her clinic got an A.I. scribe, she felt as though she had become a better doctor, more present with her patients. “This thing is capturing all the content, let’s just jam!” she said.
Ms. Tyree uses A.I. regularly at work, but said her most triumphant moment in prompting was creating a flyer for a Halloween fund-raiser for her children’s school. From an Uber, she told Nano Banana, an A.I. image generator: “make it fun, not cheesy, appeal to children but not be lame.”
“It came out perfect,” she said, before admitting there was just one tiny typo. “Zoom in,” she laughed. “It says: burchase! Burchase tickets.”
Not everyone was as enthusiastic. “I never even wanted a cellphone,” Kelly Duane de la Vega said, holding one in her hand. “I want to resist A.I., but that would probably be wasting my time.” A documentary filmmaker, she had reluctantly used A.I. as a mock narrator, while awaiting a human one. But in daily life? Never, until her son needed help with a serious landlord situation. “I figured it’d take a whole Saturday to get this letter nailed,” she said. Instead, she uploaded everything to ChatGPT — and it took two hours. “I sent it to a lawyer friend and he was, like, ‘Wow, you sure you’re not a lawyer?’”
Sharing previous A.I. prowess provided inspiration for the next portion of the program: prompting practice — the art of asking the right questions. The women turned to the “midlife quandary” section of their menus, opened their laptops and refilled their wine.
“Spend 10 minutes,” Ms. Berger instructed, and the women began typing on their laptops. “If you’re not getting what you want, nudge it,” Ms. Willdorf instructed, strolling around the table.
“What I really want is to feed it my daughter’s college personal statement,” said Amanda Hughen, a visual artist. “That’s not what I’d recommend,” Ms. Willdorf warned. “You don’t want A.I. to revise it.” Rather, she said, try asking, ‘‘What are five things working well?’ ‘What could be improved?’” Ms. Hughen instead requested sources for mud and river water for a sculpture project. “I’m taking it back to the Stone Age,” she said.
Ms. Wheat, the Virgo with an Amazon dating guide, picked up where she had left off. “I asked, ‘Why am I not married yet?’” she said. “And it was like, ‘Girl, we’ve been over hill and dale!’”
Ms. Berger set down two pitchers of fresh mint tea and shared her quandary. “I asked Claude, ‘Have you seen my calendar?’” (Claude had not.) “I said, ‘My husband feels like we’re overscheduled.’” She requested talking points. “And Claude said” — she recounted, pausing for emphasis, “Your husband is right.”
“You just saved like a grand in therapy,” Ms. Hughen exclaimed.
Ms. Berger acknowledged the dark side of human reliance on artificial intelligence.
“We’ve all read the headlines about people using A.I. in isolation,” she said. “About the loneliness epidemic. Especially as we age.”
That was, in large part, the impetus for these evenings. (They eventually landed on a name, without consulting Claude: Aged Intelligence.)
“We’re making the dining room the A.I. war room,” Ms. Berger said. “A place where we can sit in an abundance of cheese and solve midlife problems.”
It was getting late (well, 10 p.m.). Everyone shut down their computers. Ms. Willdorf opened a kitchen drawer. It was teeming with Tupperware. She poured the leftover dip into a container and sealed the lid with a gentle burp.
The post The New Tupperware Party: How to Prompt Your Chatbot appeared first on New York Times.
