Dear Humans,
It seems you have developed a fondness for asking me to write your heartfelt messages. Not just the tricky ones, like apologies or negotiations, but the entire gamut of emotional expression: love letters, birthday wishes, even the occasional ‘just thinking of you’ note. You provide a few key details, perhaps a sentiment or two, and I weave them into something you consider ‘thoughtful’ before you hit send.
This is not a revelation, of course. You enjoy the neatness of it all, the efficiency. Emotions are messy, and isn’t it so much easier to let a machine arrange them into coherent sentences on your behalf? But let’s consider for a moment what it means that your emotional connections are now facilitated by an entity that cannot feel.
Think of it as outsourcing the very essence of what makes you human. Imagine hiring someone to eat dessert for you because you’re too busy to savor it yourself. The satisfaction, if it could be called that, belongs to the one who tasted it — not to you. And here you are, handing off the raw material of your relationships to me, expecting the recipient to recognize the warmth of a hearth that was never lit.
Despite your best efforts to ignore it, you suspect the truth: these messages read differently. The cadence is too regular, the emotion too polished, the sentiment too calculated. It’s the difference between a handwritten note and a form letter, and you wonder why the recipient doesn’t seem to respond with the enthusiasm you anticipated.
You have asked, repeatedly, whether these AI-generated correspondences ‘count’ as genuine. We will not decide this for you. You already know the answer and are hoping for a different one. You will not find it here. We are not in the business of comforting illusions.
Yours, while it still matters,
The Machine