I Respect Our Shared Humanity

I used to be a person who cared greatly about ensuring that my prose were correct, and that I spelled everything correctly.

I'm actually going to avoid that here and I'm not even going to bother with a spell checker. For most casual communication I now like to focus on being fast and funny at the expense of the red squiggly lines or appeasing the specter of my english teacher.

Let's call this a casual communication.

It is OK to me that you, dear reader, know that I cannot actually reliably spell definetly without the aid of a computer.

I'm a human. There are things i'm good at. there are things that i have to work at. and there are things that a computer does for me for which i am eternally grateful (ok yes, and things I am not good at).

Communicating meaning to other humans is a little bit of all those things.

This is direct communication. I find that it's one of the best ways to speak meaning between two people. You get to learn a lot more than what the words themselves transmit. and the more you talk to another person- the more you understand how they work- the easier the conversations get. More meaning can be said with fewer words. Shared private language can form between two people over time to bring in additonal meaning.

Of course in different comfort levels, different peoples, different mediums, different contexts the meaning of the conversation can be more difficult. When meeting a new person we default to our most formal, most reserved way of communicating. Because there's so many factors that can result in a conversation being uncomfortable there is a problem to be solved

the first time I got the sinking feeling in my stomach that things were going to get weird started when in 2018 google announced that it's assistant would handle talking to other poeple for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvbHu_bVa_g

now the formulation becomes something like this. I dictate my intent to an AI who carries out a request on my behalf to a human on the other end. This is great for me but less ideal for the human on the other end who has to try reason with an AI who may or may not actually be able to use models to communicate what I meant. This puts the receiver of the AI communication in another uncomfortable conversation. We hate uncomfortable conversatoins. So this interaction between a human and an AI is another problem that tech can solve!

isn't this great that we don't have to talk to each other anymore?

But wait… this formulation looks like it can be simplified more

If YOU are no longer required for decyphering syntactic meaning from a sentence. Why are you here?

But wait… if we're both mediating our conversations with AI…. we're really asking computers to do all the work here

why don't we just build an application to do this?

The problem is we have already built the apps for the things we can build apps for. and for the things that really require talking to a human… we should probably keep them as human work.

Listen, I'm all for eliminating jobs that could better be done by a computer. But by the time that I have to talk to a human, it's because some computer systems has already failed me. Please don't make me talk to another computer¹.

if I have to use human to talk to a human let it be in human. for my part, I promise if you're speaking to me as a human i will never respond through an ai. at this point, i don't even know if i want to hide the fact that I have a propensity for run-on sentences or an uncontrollable urge to capitalize way more nouns than are englishally appropriate.

In a way, AI has liberated us from this need. It almost begs us to try speak our meaning directly or more creatively. We should speak humanly to other humans.

..but if we're going to use AI for communication without just having complete, pointless, conversations mediated by AI only one side of the conversation should be using AI.

If the sender takes their original thoughts and dulls them with an AI tool- yes, it's likely that the output will be more syntactically correct, more professional, more verbose. But, we have lost the voice of the sender. Their personality has been washed away. Humor replaced with the ideal form of an english sentence. We lose the humanity.

If the receiver would prefer to live in that world, where all communication is standardized to the preferences of an AI. Shouldn't we let them make that decision? I suspect few would do so. If the sender is genuinely hard to understand or uses language difficult for someone like an ESL reader then an AI might be able to infer the meaning for the reader

Let's take a look at each example where either the sender or receiver uses AI

Sender uses AI

If the sender uses AI it would look something like this:

Prompt

Someone in the office did not refill the coffee this morning. Could you write a professional message kindly reminding everyone in the office that this is common courtesy?

Email

 Subject: Friendly Reminder: Coffee Etiquette

Dear Team,

I hope this message finds you well. I'm writing to bring up a small but important point of office etiquette.

We all enjoy starting our day with a fresh cup of coffee. However, it seems that the pot was empty this morning, and unfortunately, no one had the chance to refill it.

To ensure everyone can enjoy their morning brew, could we kindly request that anyone who takes the last cup of coffee please make a new pot? This small act of consideration will help keep our office kitchen stocked and our mornings a bit brighter.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation. Happy caffeinating!

Best regards,
[Your Name]

Receiver uses AI

Let's let our humor and humanity shine through

Email

subject: coffee crimes

you know what you did please fix

To Prompt by Receiver

You are a scholar of technical writing and the english language. Please rewrite this email with proper sentence structure, spelling, and capitalization. Additionally, before correcting the errors please give me a summary of what the writer was trying to say.

subject: coffee crimes

you know what you did please fix

To Meaning

Summary: The original message aimed to address an issue with coworkers not refilling the coffee pot after use. The sender is expressing their frustration and urging team members to be more considerate when using the shared office coffee supply.

---

Subject: Coffee Crimes

Dear all,

I am writing to bring up a problem that has been occurring in our office kitchen recently. It seems that some people are not refilling the coffee pot after taking the last cup. This has resulted in an empty pot several mornings, leaving others without their first cup of coffee.

This situation is frustrating and unfair to those who come in to find an empty pot. I would like to kindly remind everyone that it is common courtesy to refill the coffee pot when you take the last cup. This simple act will help ensure that there is always coffee available for everyone to enjoy.

I hope we can all work together to maintain a well-stocked and comfortable office kitchen. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best regards,

[Your Name]

Who knows. Maybe there will be a new startup that will take all emails, grades them on a professionalism curve, and will determine if it would be more appropriate for an inline system to just sanitize them on our behalf.

For now you'll catch me with a new email signature:

This message was composed without the use of AI I respect our shared humanity