The Automated Lie: AI and Your Devices Don't Love You

Your Apple Watch just told you to "you're making tremendous progress this week." 

ChatGPT started it's response to your query by complimenting you on your  insightful question. 

LinkedIn just offered you congratulations on your work anniversary. 

And somewhere in your kitchen drawer, yesterday's fortune cookie slip still promises that "good things are coming your way."

All lies. Beautiful, well-intentioned, algorithmically-optimized lies.

Here's the uncomfortable truth we've all agreed to ignore: kindness doesn't scale. You can't compress genuine human care into a push notification. You can't reduce authentic encouragement to a randomized string of motivational text. Yet somehow, we've built an entire digital ecosystem designed to simulate the very thing it fundamentally cannot produce: sincerity.

Think about the last time someone genuinely surprised you with kindness. Not the predictable "Happy Birthday" post that Facebook reminded them to write, but real, spontaneous human warmth. Maybe it was a coworker who noticed you seemed stressed, or a stranger who helped carry your groceries, or your kid who drew you a picture just because. That moment had weight because it was unscheduled, unscripted, and irreplaceable.

Now compare that to your fitness tracker congratulating you for standing up. The emptiness is almost insulting.

We've become so starved for positive reinforcement that we'll accept it from anything ... even machines that wouldn't know genuine encouragement if it were written directly into their source code. We've trained ourselves to feel a tiny dopamine hit when our phones tell us we're doing great, as if a device that can't distinguish between a sunrise and a screensaver somehow has insight into our worth.

The cruelest part isn't that these automated affirmations are fake. It's that they're training us to accept fake as sufficient. Every time we smile at a generic "You've got this!" notification, we're lowering the bar for what counts as human connection. We're teaching ourselves that engagement algorithms understand us better than the people in our lives.

Real kindness is inconvenient. It shows up at the wrong time. It costs something. It can't be A/B tested or optimized for engagement. It doesn't come with analytics showing how it performed across different user segments. It just is ... messy, imperfect, and irreplaceably human.

So the next time your smartwatch tries to coach you through a breathing exercise, or your video call platform tells you you're "amazing," remember what you're really being offered: the digital equivalent of a participation trophy. A hollow simulation of care from something that has never cared about anything.

Save your appreciation for the humans who show up without being programmed to do so. They're rarer than you think, and infinitely more valuable than anything your devices will ever tell you about yourself.

The machines can keep their compliments. I'll take the real thing, thank you very much.