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For quite a while, someone has been living inside my computer, writing emails for me.
I don’t recall signing up for this artificial intelligence feature, which is like having a word valet. It’s in my phone, too, which offers three serviceable but impersonal responses I can fire off to someone who has just sent me an email pitching a story or asking if I want to meet for coffee.
“I’d like to do coffee,” was one of the suggested responses to a recent email. “Let me circle back soon about timing.”
One argument for these features is that they can save time and free me up for more important tasks. But it takes longer for me to read the three fabricated email options than it would take to write my own response.
I find this really irritating for about 150 reasons, one of which is that in an ever-automated world, it’s another nail in the coffin of human interaction. And yes, there are at least 150 reasons. I know because I asked AI and it spit them out in approximately three seconds. No. 148: “It sounds like it’s written by a committee.”
Prof. Mor Naaman, later quoted in this article, is a professor of information science at the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.