How can AI help you deal with family during Christmas

Looking ahead to the festive period with dread? Generative AI could help smooth over the challenges this Christmas.

Christmas is a time for family. But sometimes, families don’t get along. Whether it’s that awkward uncle, difficult aunt, or challenging cousin, there are any number of reasons why the Christmas period can be tough for some people. But technology can help smooth over the issues that you can face – while also making Christmas preparations even easier.

Picking the right Christmas gift can be difficult, but generative AI is already being used to try to pinpoint the perfect present for friends and relatives. Prompting tools like ChatGPT or Claude with information about your ideal recipient and their interests can result in good suggestions of potential presents.

Similarly, if you’re looking to prepare the ideal meal for Christmas Day, AI can help recommend menus for all those picky eaters and people with dietary requirements that will wow, rather than underwhelm.

One thing to beware of when using tools like ChatGPT as a Christmas menu guide is that it can sometimes still struggle with internal logic – particularly when recommending recipes. So be sure to double-check any quantities of ingredients, and that everything you need for the recipe is there, long before Christmas Day.

Managing conflict

One of the biggest issues people find around Christmas time is big bust-ups with their loved ones. Individuals with whom you spend most of the year separate from all coming together for a period where merriment and enjoyment are mandatory can cause resentment that can quickly boil over into arguments. ChatGPT-like AI tools can help you craft diplomatic responses to tricky family conversations or mediate misunderstandings by role-playing scenarios in advance.

Similarly, if you’re struggling to come up with what to talk about with that cousin you only see once a year, generative AI tools can be a good conversational crutch. It can suggest engaging topics to discuss while avoiding controversial subjects like politics or religion that can soon backfire into blazing arguments.

For families that span different countries, the advanced voice mode (sometimes called live conversation mode on some AI tools) can be a boon, helping you converse with relatives who speak a different language to you, and avoiding the awkward silences over present giving or meal eating.

One area where generative AI tools come into their own is their ability to create new entertainment or games that people will not be familiar with.

Keeping entertained

One area where generative AI tools come into their own is their ability to create new entertainment or games that people will not be familiar with. Board games are a time-honored tradition for Christmas get-togethers among families, but it can quickly become a case of playing the same game you have for decades, or spending lots of money on new ones that only ever get used once a year.

Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can suggest or generate trivia questions, personalized games, or fun holiday activities to keep everyone entertained. They can also help turn the cast of characters that turn up in a family home at Christmastime into a fun-filled story through custom storytelling – though you may want to make sure that the story it generates isn’t likely to offend any relatives.

But for family members who are not that tech-literate, the sheer existence of these tools on your smartphone may simply be enough to get you through the Christmas holidays.

Rather than trying to find strategies to survive difficult topics of conversation, or getting generative AI to make new games, consider how extraordinary the technology will appear to people who have never encountered it. Many will have heard of ChatGPT and similar tools, but have never actually seen it in use.

So load up the app, get out the phone and use that as a way to get through the Christmas period unscathed.