Need some help writing your emails? Through the wonders of AI and large-scale language models (LLMS), you can now have custom-made messages in Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and many other email clients. Most of the time, the AI ​​option is immediately available. pops up, ready to give you a lot of help though.

The pitch is that you can offload the burden of dealing with email to AI, and move on to other tasks that may be more interesting and important. Along the way, I’ve talked to a lot of people who now use AI chatbots like this. But it’s not something I’m ready to embrace, and I don’t think I ever will.

Here are my reasons, which may or may not resonate with you, although I haven’t mentioned the energy consumption and copyright infringement issues that hang over the use of AI in general. You can keep asking if I want some help with Gmail, Gemini, but I’ll shut you down completely.

I don’t want to forget to write

Difficulty empty email.
Credit: Lifehacker

Writing is very easy, indeed most of us can do it from an early age without too much trouble. to write ok It’s tough, but you don’t have to be a best-selling author to fire off some emails. So is there any harm in using AI for some low-level email composing? It might be faster and more convenient, but I’m not sure it’s actually worthwhile.

As author David McCullough Said once: “Writing is thinking.” The skill of being able to choose the right word to put in front of the back sets the cogs of the mind in motion, and forces some thought into what is being said. Word choice and sentence structure matter, even on the shortest and most banal of emails.

I don’t want to sit down at the laptop one day and find myself struggling to compose a few lines of text. Is it far-fetched? maybe not, Based on the reports From those who have already tried to farm emails to AI. “Is it hard trying to translate that thought in your head into an email?” asks Google. Well, yes, it is, and it’s sort of like that.

People deserve a human response

It’s fair to say that many of us receive an inordinate amount of email (if you don’t, consider yourself lucky). Chances are your incoming email will be from people you don’t know personally, but no matter the sender and receiver in an email conversation, I think the human responses are worth the effort.

If all of our emails—arranging work drinks, applying for jobs, discussing a project—are written by AI, we’re headed for piles and piles of machine-written missives that lack any kind of novelty or personal touch. Imagine a group email chain where every reply looks the same, regardless of who sent it.

Even if I’m writing a simple “no thanks” email, if I’m communicating with another human being, I’m of the opinion that they deserve a response that comes straight from me. It’s more of a principled stance than anything else, but I’m sticking with it.

Ai writes a very common slope

An AI email that looks like many other AI emails.
Credit: Lifehacker

For example, get an AI to write a thank-you note to someone who recently hosted an event you recently attended, and you’re going to get a generic spell that averages out from countless other thank-you notes. It’s bland, unremarkable and forgettable.

I can see the temptation to use AI to compose an important email—applying for a job, maybe, or appealing a company decision—but your message is likely to end up reading like an algorithm-processed, mass-produced text. You sound like everyone else, basically (see previous point).

you can do Draft and then edit the AI, but if I started down that path, I could see myself editing my messages less and less, out of laziness or habit.

I don’t trust AI to correct the details

AI still makes a lot of mistakes, although chatbot developers don’t mention them much. If you’re drafting an email about a new project pitch, a family get-together, a customer inquiry or whatever, there’s no guarantee the AI ​​will get all the details right.

The more important the content of the email, the more important it becomes. Companies pushing AI-powered emails are of the opinion that we can all follow up on business leads, manage colleagues, and convey heartfelt sentiments over email with the help of AI, but I’m not sure.

People make mistakes too, but I’d rather be a black box of algorithms that aren’t fully understood even by the developers who code them. Does the AI ​​know the people I’m emailing, and need their specific details? Absolutely not.

Talking to AI AI is not the future I want

We may not even need to click “send” in the future.
Credit: Lifehacker

To paraphrase George Orwellif you want a picture of the future, imagine your AI sending thousands of emails a minute to everyone’s AIS, forever. At what point do we completely abdicate responsibility to chatbots, and just let them get on with it? I don’t want to take a single step towards it.

Right now, even the most ardent AI fans aren’t suggesting we start sending e-written emails into the ether without checking and editing them first, but isn’t that the obvious next step? For a final productivity boost, I can now watch the Google I/O onstage presentation.

Preliminary studies Show up already That we forget almost everything while writing using AI, which has troubling implications if we’re sending important information that needs to be retrieved later. That’s not the future I’d sign up for, no matter how much AI hints insist.