A Netflix episode of Escape at Dannemora gets interrupted by a Canva commercial where a could-be AI-generated voice says something like write less, say more. I will not elaborate on how annoyed I am by commercials on Netflix, but I am. Anyway, Canva offers its generative AI tool to write texts for you. You throw a brief idea at it, and the program will write you a complete text. Painless content creation, pretty much the standard all generative AI tools offer nowadays.
At some point during the last couple of months, Google embedded Gemini into my email account. I tried, but I haven’t found how to deactivate it yet, so I avoid touching the star-shaped icon for now. But I press it unintentionally occasionally and, every time, Gemini eagerly offers to read the emails for me and give me a summary of them instead. Of course, it also wants to be the one composing my messages to other humans.
Think about what that means for a communication process: at one end, an AI writes text for us to make us look smarter, and at the other end, another AI reduces that exact text into something more digestible for us. What is the point of it all, then? Couldn’t we simply send dummy-appropriate messages to each other, if it is all we know how to do now, apparently?