Anomalisa

I have had a couple of eerie experiences recently.

I was reading an annual feedback note from a coworker and something felt off. Everything they wrote made sense and aligned with what I expected them to say. But the words just weren’t theirs.

I knew because I worked with them on a daily basis, heard them talk, read their posts. I could recognize their style. This wasn’t it. It’s as if the note was simultaneously written by them and also not written by them.

Of course, it was written by AI.

The coworker threw their ideas, opinions, and talking points into the context, and Claude spat out the text. The result matched what the coworker wanted to say, just not the way they would’ve said it.

The other one was a debate on Slack. A colleague was replying to critical comments on their announcement. At first I thought they had just mastered the managerial tone of voice, starting each response with an appreciation for how deeply the question asker cares about the topic. It was overkill but not unheard of.

But then it got even more on the nose with snippets such as “You have hit on something incredibly important” and “you touch on something so deeply human and important here”.

It was so clearly AI-written that someone even called them out on it in the discussion.

Then I read a blog post from an ex-colleague.

I haven’t been reading their blog before but I did remember our conversations. This did not feel like it.

Naturally, the final paragraph revealed how the post was written: by ‘puring’ their thoughts into the machine, and then posting what came back.

When called out on the AI usage, the usual response of these people are:

• I’m not a native English speaker, AI helps me find the right words and get the grammar right;
• AI helps me make sure I communicate my thoughts clearly and precisely;
• and the ideas are still mine, I came up with those, not the AI.

Valid as these points may be, stripping the individual communication style of people is just inhumane to me. The way you express yourself, messy and imperfect as it is, is part of who you are and how you connect with others. If a polished communication style becomes commoditized, it also becomes meaningless.

Charlie Kafuman’s wonderful movie Anomalisa depicts a man to whom everybody sounds the same, including his wife and son. In this stop-motion movie, every character is voiced by the same actor, and it’s really creepy. So much so that as soon as the man meets someone who has a different voice, he instantly falls in love.

This is the future we’re looking at if having our answers formulated by AI becomes the norm. We’re all just artificially enhanced — and simultaneously anonymised — personas, holding on to “hey, but the ideas are mine!” for dear life.

(At least until we start using AI to brainstorm our ideas too, retreating to “hey, but the feelings are mine!”…)