Hi, all!

Recently, I encountered a younger working professional who said, “I don’t like to tell people I have an AI agent to write emails for me.”

She said that to me after I shared that I was pivoting mid-life to work more firmly in creative writing. She said to me like it was a guilty admission, “I have trained it to use my voice; it’s not perfect, but it’s getting there.”

I quipped in response, “Until the tech gets so good it can replace you!” I don’t think that quelled her anxiety, or at least not the right anxiety.

What occurred to me in the dark belly of her admission was the drive for why people use generative AI to help communicate--yes, there’s laziness, or wanting to be more efficient. But on the flip side is the idea that agentic AI might actually become better at communicating than many people. And it’s increasingly getting there.

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For me, with years of writing under my belt, doctoral training in rhetoric, and having taught so many college composition courses, I forget that writing was a skill I developed. I don’t have the desire to cognitively offload because I am confident in my competence to the point that I can’t imagine not writing for myself on a daily basis.

However, I have no problem reaching for a calculator to do simple math, or even using autocorrect on my phone. Eliminating minor friction to more efficiently complete major tasks makes sense. However, I do so knowing I can do basic math and write grammatically correctly without those tools.

In the same conversation, I told the young woman that I was old enough to have seen the birth of the Internet at around their age. It was a time when we had a technology that we didn’t fully understand what we could use it for; then it evolved into not knowing how to use it ethically, and meanwhile it transformed our daily lives to such an extent that we now have a whole generation who have never had to live without it.

My point was that we are at a stage in using a technological invention where we are experimenting both with how to use agentic AI and how to do so and stay human ourselves. And the next generation may never face that question.

I think as we move forward in this new age, we have this shift in what it means to be a language-making animal when we have language-making machines at our disposal.

I know if I give my text to AI and say spellcheck this, it may say something like, “You could tighten this by doing blah; would you like me to create an organized rewrite for you?” The danger then is a homogenized improvement—the version it spits out may or may not be more persuasive than I could be, circular logic and all. The Faustian bargain isn’t that it may replace my voice. It is that maybe one day I couldn’t live without it doing so.

I don’t think there are easy answers in this existential shift coinciding with a technological paradigm shift. But hearing the twinge of regret in the young person’s voice, I tried to remind her this is an incredibly exciting time to be in; what she’s anxious about now might be codified or abandoned tomorrow.

For me, rather than feeling like a machine could replace me as a creative writer, I think there’s a new playground, and maybe a non-human participant on that playground too. But there we stood, the young woman and I, without a non-human agent between us, and that was still good too.

See you on the flip side,

Melissa

(with my non-agentic mini me)

Have you noticed the world going catawampus because of AI-assisted communication?

I talk about my thoughts inspired by The New York Times article Can This Man Stop Lying. What does it teach us about the thin line between storytelling and deception? I share my thoughts on what good writing does that lying prevents.