Once upon a time, email was the necessary evil that allowed us to communicate with people we didn’t want to talk to, without the messy intimacy of a phone call. It was quick, efficient, and blessedly ignorable. You could respond to your boss’s 800-word memo with a single, blessed “Sounds good.” You could “circle back” or “loop in” with minimal damage to your soul.
But now we have AI. And suddenly, every exchange feels like it’s being ghostwritten by the collective spirit of Emily Post and HAL 9000.
Are you excited for your coworkers to become way more verbose? To see every terse acknowledgment balloon into a novella dripping with artificial sincerity?
That “Sure thing” that once took three seconds to type will now arrive as:
“Absolutely, Scott! I couldn’t agree more with your insightful perspective on the Q3 outreach initiative. Your leadership continues to inspire not just results, but meaning.”
And oh, the joy of the inbox! Because who doesn’t want to live in a world where every small business owner, club organizer, and slightly unhinged neighbor can now generate sleek, hyper-personalized marketing copy at the push of a button?
The same algorithm that writes customer engagement emails for Fortune 500 brands is now helping your local lawn-care guy send out:
“Dear Valued Community Member, We here at Steve’s Turf Emporium appreciate the deep roots we’ve grown together.”
You used to be able to spot a spammer by the mangled syntax and questionable punctuation. Now you’ll be deleting messages that read like TED Talks.
And let’s talk about emotion. Remember when sincerity had that lovely, flawed human awkwardness? When you could tell your friend meant well, even if his condolence email read like it was typed through tears and misspellings?
Now you get to wonder if he wrote it himself or if he just clicked “Generate Message: Empathetic Tone.”
“Your loss is unimaginable, but please know that your strength in this difficult time is a beacon to us all.”
Lovely, touching ... and entirely machine-made.
We’ve entered the uncanny valley of correspondence, folks. The messages are smoother, the grammar impeccable, the tone perfectly calibrated. And yet, somehow, every word feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t quite mean it.
The worst part? The machines didn’t steal our humanity ... we handed it to them, neatly formatted, with a polite closing line and an optional P.S.
So yes, AI and email together are the ultimate productivity duo. We can all now communicate faster, better, longer, and with precisely the same amount of emptiness.
Sent from my AI.
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