It’s not personal, AI… and that’s the problem

I have a photo album on my phone called Smile File.

In it are screen shots of all kinds of correspondence from my friends and family, a hall of fame of sorts. Like the text my dad sent me after he dropped me off at the airport to see Chappell Roan in Nashville: “3 songs in H-O-T-T-O-G-O.” Or the funny messages from friends that make me feel like they really know me. Or thoughtful emails from readers letting me know my writing has affected them in some way.

Among my most prized keepers: two notes from two different dear friends, asking me if I would be Auntie Jen to their kids.

I look at my Smile File on the days when my brain is tricking me into thinking nobody likes me or when I worry that I’ve run out of words and maybe I’m actually secretly illiterate.

So, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that it would break my heart to learn that any of these missives were actually written by ChatGPT.

People are offloading all kinds of tasks to chat bots to “save time” and “maximize productivity.” We know that people are using chatbots to write essays at university or to put together slide decks and spreadsheets at work.

But people are also using ChatGPT to compose obituaries, birthday and sympathy texts, wedding vows, speeches. You know, the kinds of personal missives that are supposed to be, well, personal. Sincere and from the heart.

I understand the impulse. Despite being a professional writer, I, too, can be at a loss for words — especially when someone I love is in pain.

It can be so hard to know what to say when everything feels wrong and inadequate. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Heart emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji.

And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Feeling wrong and inadequate. I wonder if we’re so hung up on saying the “right” thing, the perfect thing, that we’re becoming overly self-conscious communicators who can’t rely — or are made to feel like we can’t rely — on our own brains.

It’s also a byproduct of the modern desire to live a frictionless life. Other people’s emotions are messy and inconvenient; no one can time the death of a parent or their unexpected ER visit with your work schedule. Relationships require effort and maintenance.

Those ideas are at odds with a digital world in which ease, convenience and comfort are a few taps away.

What about greeting cards, you might ask. OK, what about greeting cards? Those still take effort, even if you didn’t write the sentiment inside. Selecting, purchasing and possibly mailing a card — which usually also has a hand-written note or, at the very least, “love” in your person’s penmanship — is an act of thought and care.

Enlisting ChatGPT to compose a “thinking of you” message might smooth out the (temporary, I will add) discomfort of not knowing what to say and potentially getting it wrong. But it will also make you sound like someone else.

Your friends want to hear from you. They want you to show up, however imperfectly. You can rely on your own brain, I promise. I’d rather get an “I’m sorry” or a “girl, that blows” or even an emoji than an uncanny-valley message spit out by a bot.

We will be poorer for it if we outsource our compassion and creativity to a machine that can only ever approximate emotions because it’s never felt any. The machine can’t speak from the heart because it doesn’t have one. ChatGPT can only make you sound more empathetic. It can’t make you be more empathetic.

It’s OK to not know what to say or how to say it. But I also think you actually do know what to say.

And if you truly don’t, find a poem. Or a song lyric. Something written by another human being who has, at the very least, felt what you’re feeling.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca