by Serguey Shinder
A colleague I had worked with for years was leaving under circumstances that were not entirely his choice, and he sent me a long message about it. He was not asking for anything. He was telling someone he trusted how it felt. I read it on a busy afternoon, felt the weight of it, and then did something I have thought about many times since, which was open a model and ask it to help me write a reply.
The reply it produced was good. Warm, well judged, generous in the right places, better written than anything I would have managed in the ten minutes I had. I changed a couple of words so it sounded more like me and I sent it. He wrote back and thanked me for it, and there was no bad outcome at all, no moment where anything went wrong, and yet I have not been able to leave it alone.
What bothers me is not that the words were not mine. It is what I skipped in order to get them. Writing to someone in that situation is difficult precisely because you have to sit with their situation for a while before you know what to say. The struggle is not an obstacle in front of the message. The struggle is the part where you actually think about the person, and I had found a way to produce the output without doing the thinking, and so I never thought about him at all that afternoon.
He got a good message. I got nothing, and more importantly I gave nothing, because the thing he was owed was not a paragraph of well chosen sentences, it was some portion of my attention, and attention is the one input these tools cannot supply on my behalf. I had automated the part that was the entire point and kept the part that was merely delivery.
I am not making a general argument here. I use these tools constantly for work that is genuinely about the output, where the words are a vehicle and nobody cares who assembled them, and I think that is fine. But there is a category of writing where the effort is the message, where a person can tell, not from the prose but from something underneath it, whether you were really there. Condolences. Apologies. Thanks that means something. Feedback to someone who is struggling.
So I have drawn a line that is not defensible on any efficiency grounds and that I intend to keep anyway. If the writing is addressed to one person about something that matters to them, I write it badly and slowly and by myself. It takes longer and it reads worse, and that is not the trade I am making. The trade is that I have to think about them, which was what they wanted in the first place.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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