![]() ![]() Perhaps our very notion of meaningful human connection depends on our refusal to relinquish such emotional work. ![]() It's not that there are certain realms of human experience that are intrinsically too sacred to automate, which seems to be what you're getting at when you ask whether using AI for your speech would make you the “worst man.” On the contrary, it may be that human intimacy blooms in precisely those pockets of life that have not yet been widely exploited by commercial or mechanical forces. If I can offer some more prescriptive parting advice, Lost, I'd urge you to consider that the logic of the commodity frontier can work in reverse. Just as the computer was, for Steve Jobs, a “bicycle for the mind,” so language-generation tools might be regarded as the vehicle that transports the spirit of our emotions from their point of origin to a desired destination. In conversations about AI-generated text, the prompt is often spoken of as the logos, the spiritual breath of human authenticity that animates the synthetic output (dismissed as so much mechanical “wordage”) with life and meaning. ![]() You are, after all, the one providing the model with the essential, albeit rough, emotive ingredients to produce the finished product. But perhaps you have reasoned that intent and selection-“It's the thought!”-are what matters in these situations. Writing a wedding speech would seem to require similar emotional engagement. When Vanderbilt University enlisted ChatGPT to generate an email offering condolences to the victims of the mass shooting at Michigan State, the school was criticized for using automated tools for a gesture that demanded, as one student put it, “genuine, human empathy, not a robot.” In the case of AI, there have already been some breaches of this still-hazy border. Such products have long approached what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “commodity frontier”-the threshold of activities we deem “too personal to pay for.” It's a perimeter that exists even when the products we enlist are (for the moment) free, and the arrival of new technologies calls for its constant renegotiation. Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite Ideas writers. ![]()
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