I have been struggling a bit this week after reading a message I sent to a coworker. I typed every word of the message, researched some points independently, and in the end it was indistinguishable from something generated by AI. My cadence, punctuation, tone were all reminiscent of something generated by an LLM, and I am sure that my coworker’s assumption was that Claude had drafted the message. The optics are that I couldn’t give the time of day to respond to this question from my peer.

Interpersonal communication should be the last bastion of hand-crafted writing. I think my largest concern with that message being perceived as written by AI is a sense of respect. When asking a question of someone else you are signaling that you care about their opinion, and receiving something generated back is akin to getting a passive-aggressive link to Google. I’ve always had a gripe with users on forums answering questions with links to a wiki or “Googled it for you”; sometimes we aren’t searching for objective answers, but rather experiences from like-minded people that can inform our own choices.

This flows directly into creative writing. Being able to evoke a personal, unique experience through self expression is something AI will never replace at a fundamental, human level. The most meaningful books I’ve read have been rife with vagueness. Life is an ambiguous thing. One of my clearest complaints with my experience reading Evelio Rosero’s House of Fury was how overt the messaging was. A symbolic Goya painting is repeatedly mentioned by different characters within a span of a few chapters, hammering home a visual metaphor that lands the first time. Fears and anxieties are plainly stated for the reader. You can contrast this against the protagonists of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling and David Szalay’s Flesh who express themselves through their actions, isolated and avoidant of their emotions: the journey, as a reader, is valuable in as far as you feel the emotions of the character despite the lack of author’s instruction. Reflecting on their experiences contextualizes their emotional responses. Part of what defines human writing is the vagueness implied by our lived experience.

All this said, I am committed to writing and responding to messages from others in my own voice, because communication is trending towards a kind of sterility and objectivity that is antithetical to what makes us who we are.