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Hey Google, stop trying to write my emails!

How AI-generated email creates a synthetic version of you.

I first noticed it when, a few months ago, I opened an email from Ian, my literary agent. Before I’d had a chance to read anything he’d written, Gmail was recommending a full, fleshed-out, AI-generated reply, ventriloquizing ideas for a book and even my feelings about the job transition I’d recently made. It had mined my inbox to infer why Ian was writing to me and ingested bits of my style, even signing off with the lowercase “m” that I use with people with whom I have an easy familiarity.

For around a decade, Google had been suggesting very generic, sometimes monosyllabic “smart replies” — things like “Okay” or “Thanks!” or “Any thoughts?” I’ve used these to send quick acknowledgements to emails I’d have otherwise forgotten about. But in the last couple years, Gmail has begun to offer fully formed draft replies that presume to impersonate my own, individual reactions to my interlocutors’ questions, ideas, and emotions.

This felt like a striking turn. I reflected with some sadness on the idea of sending one of these to someone who matters to me — how dehumanizing to both me and Ian it would feel to make him read a counterfeit subjectivity pretending to be my own.

You might say this is no big deal; maybe it gives you time back for deeper work or more meaningful parts of your life (I wouldn’t begrudge that at all — AI saves me time, too!). We’re all drowning in too much email, much of it pointless or lacking any great meaning. Isn’t that exactly the kind of day-to-day tedium that we should happily invite AI to liberate us from?

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