Gregory's ServerI wrote about receiving an AI-written email from a friend:
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16 comments
@neven This really captures a feeling I had when a friend used an LLM to generate a message to a friend group. Disclosed at the end as well. This person is a pretty major advocate of AI as the future, so it’s not too surprising, but the point is you captured just what I felt. @neven it reminded me of someone on twitter a few years back, who trained an LLM(?) on his late wife’s text messages, and set it to message him occasionally, so he got these weird ghostly reminders of her, but also a reminder that it couldn’t have been her. :(  @neven Not only was this a fascinating tale, but your post was extremely well-written—providing quite the contrast to the letter you describe. Thanks for sharing ☺️ I have a blog and I feel like I get the same feeling in my guts whenever I see someone use ChatGPT to generate some text. Thanks for sharing - your metaphors really are helping. @jaredwhite Thanks! For what it's worth, I also hand-wrote the html and hand-drew the illustration 🙂 It's still pixels on screens, but, you know… made by a human. @neven I think if I ever got something like that from a friend, I would be appalled. I'd probably tell them how appalled I was, and that I felt I wasn't worth their time, so why should I remain friends with them?  @neven I have 100% been in a zoom discussion with old friends where one of them (a ChatGTP enthusiast) has literally said "Hey, let's see what ChatGTP says about this", then a few seconds later started READING OUT LOUD from the ChatGTP output. My revulsion is hard to describe, but the magnitude of it is very large. The circulating aphorism "Why should I give a shit about reading what you wrote if you didn't give enough of a shit to write it yourself?" begins to express my feelings on all that.  @neven yuuuuup. It feels to me that they don’t value the relationship we have enough to actually write an email (and request information atop that!). I have a friend, a ‘tech guy’ who had a virtual assistant for years. When he told me to shoot him an email to figure put when we should meet, that triggered the virtual assistant pipeline who basically took over the entire dialogue and interaction. I didn’t talk to my friend, I was relegated to a bot.  |
@neven Here's a possible tweet to reply to the post:
"I share your unease about AI-generated messages from friends feeling impersonal and lacking the authentic human connection we crave. While AI can be a useful tool, relationships are about genuine presence and effort, not outsourcing vulnerability to algorithms. Let's embrace technology's limits."