![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/platform.vox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/03\/image-6.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=2.6,0,95.4,93.528408013651\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFor around a decade<\/a>, Google had been suggesting very generic, sometimes monosyllabic \u201csmart replies\u201d \u2014 things like \u201cOkay\u201d or \u201cThanks!\u201d or \u201cAny thoughts?\u201d I\u2019ve used these to send quick acknowledgements to emails I\u2019d have otherwise forgotten about. But in the last couple years<\/a>, Gmail has begun to offer fully formed draft replies that presume to impersonate my own, individual reactions to my interlocutors\u2019 questions, ideas, and emotions.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 how dehumanizing to both me and Ian it would feel to make him read a counterfeit subjectivity pretending to be my own.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t begrudge that at all \u2014 AI saves me time, too!). We\u2019re all drowning in too much email, much of it pointless or lacking any great meaning. Isn\u2019t that exactly the kind of day-to-day tedium that we should happily invite AI to liberate us from?<\/p>\n But I think that this machine-generated personal correspondence, which is only likely to spread further into other forms of communication, has preoccupied me because there\u2019s something deeper going on here. A lot of ink has been spilled in the last few years about AI-generated writing and its social consequences \u2014 how it will deskill millions of workers<\/a>, outsource our thinking<\/a>, confuse kids growing up in the AI age about the difference between real and synthetic friends<\/a>, and so on. We already know that AI language is unnervingly good<\/a> at sounding like it\u2019s the product of a fellow consciousness. But the particular creepiness of elaborate email autocomplete is that it\u2019s training on and simulating your consciousness. And as it does so, it also gives you a little less reason to actually be conscious.<\/p>\n AI writing and \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d<\/p>\n Like many knowledge workers<\/a> who derive their living and their identities from cognitive capacities<\/a> now being at least partially replicated in silicon, I have a complicated and ambivalent relationship with generative AI. I now depend on it to research almost every story I work on, a purpose for which it\u2019s obviously very useful (despite those who still insist it can never be useful for anything).<\/p>\n I am, though, deeply skeptical of using it for writing, because, as many writers smarter than me have already noted<\/a>, writing is inextricable from thinking, and short-circuiting it can diminish our capacity for deep thought. The friction of writing is not dead weight but is part of how you decide what you mean and give coherence to ideas. For that reason, my former Vox colleague, the brilliant Kelsey Piper, who is generally positive about AI\u2019s potential to make us more productive and improve human life, said<\/a> on a recent podcast episode, \u201cI would never use it to write.\u201d<\/p>\n