I have noticed a new phenomenon in how we interact with each other lately. If you have ever used AI to draft a message, you have likely participated in this process yourself.
Instead of simply communicating with "Person A," we are increasingly likely to transform and polish our thoughts through an AI filter first. Whether it is a workplace email, a job application, or a formal inquiry to an institution, we lean on these tools to ensure our output looks and feels "better" than our raw thoughts. I have used this myself several times, and it works remarkably well; the result reads with a level of professional polish that is difficult to achieve manually.
But here is the catch: I get the feeling that instead of humans interacting with one another, our messages are being mediated through a digital middleman. This becomes especially awkward in formal contexts. Take a message to an insurance company: instead of sending a haphazard note, we let AI polish it until it meets every legal and professional standard, complete with a perfect header and footer. You send it off, feeling confident. But the receiver on the other end—who is likely swamped with similarly dense prose—might just use their own AI to "dumb it down" again just to understand the core point. We have created a strange loop. The complex legal frameworks we operate in seem to require this complication, yet it makes me wonder if we should all just switch back to a more basic language. Wouldn't it be nice to simply explain in plain English what the problem is? Perhaps simplification doesn't work when precision is key, and in those cases, AI is a vital tool for navigating the system. However, it also encourages a certain intellectual bypass.
There are people now using prompts as blunt as "just make a good CV" or "write a response saying I don't want to do that," and the AI dutifully provides a paragraph of sophisticated prose. It begs the question: Why think when AI can do it for you? While AI can bring out the best in our professional presentation, it also highlights our laziness. Where does this leave us when the systems do all the actual "talking"? As humans, we strive for clarity and efficiency, yet the tools we rely on are adding layers of automated interpretation. This isn't inherently bad—AI can streamline processes and filter noise—but it raises uncomfortable questions about authenticity. When our direct voices are consistently mediated by algorithms, what happens to our actual intent?
Perhaps the next time you send an email, fill out a form, or chat with a company, pause for a moment. You might just be talking to an AI, who is talking to another AI, who is ultimately trying to talk to a human—or perhaps, just another AI.
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