Why getting AI to write your emails could create more work

Analysis: AI allows people to offload many of the routines associated with our inbox, but it can also change email in unexpected ways

By Daniel Angus, Queensland University of Technology

I hope this article finds you well.

Did that make you cringe, ever so slightly? In the decades since the very first email was sent in 1971, the technology has become the quiet infrastructure of white-collar work. Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. But for many, it has morphed into something else: always there, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming.

Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox – drafting, summarising and replying.

My colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society found 45.6% of us have recently used a generative AI tool and 82.6% of those using it for text generation. A healthy chunk of that use likely includes email.

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From RTÉ Brainstorm, why do you have so many unread emails?

So, what happens if we end up fully automating one of the staples of the white-collar daily grind? Will AI technologies reduce some of the friction, or generate new forms of it? Dare I ask – are we actually about to get more email?

Why the printer isn’t dead yet

Soon after the advent of email, some voices in the business world heralded the coming end of paper use in the office. That didn’t happen. If you work in an office today, there’s a good chance you still have a printer.

In their 2001 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them. Sellen and Harper show how paper use didn’t disappear with the rise of email and other digital communication tools; in many cases, it intensified. The takeaway isn’t that offices failed to modernise, but rather that work reorganised around what these new tools could do.

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In this case, paper persisted not only out of habit, but because of what it affords: it is easy to annotate, spread out, carry and view at a glance. This was all too clunky (or impossible) to perform via the digital alternatives.

At the same time, email and digitisation dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing communication. It was far easier to send more messages, to more people, more often.

Circling back to today

Will AI be different? If early signs are anything to go by, the answer is: not in the way we might hope. Like earlier waves of workplace technology, AI is less likely to replace existing communication practices than to intensify them – but at least it might come with better grammar and a suspiciously upbeat tone. Some new AI tools offer to manage your inbox entirely, feeding into broader privacy concerns about the technology.

From RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime, what does AI know about you?

At this moment, what a lot of these products seem to offer is not an escape from email, but a smoothing of its rough edges. Workers are using AI to soften otherwise blunt requests, modify their tone or expand what might otherwise be considered too brief a response. Rather than removing the need to communicate, these tools offer pathways to make a delicate performance easier.

What email is actually for

Email, like many forms of communication, is as much about maintaining everyday relationships as it is about the transfer of information.

At work, it’s often about signalling competence, responsiveness, collegiality and authority. “Just looping someone in” or “circling back” are all part of our absurd office vocabulary, a shared dialect that helps us navigate hierarchy, soften demands and keep things moving – all without saying what we really think.

From RTÉ Archives, Caoimhe Ni Chonchoille reports for RTÉ News in 2014 on Google’s launch of Gmail as Gaeilge

If AI lowers the effort required to produce these signals, it won’t necessarily reduce their importance, but it could unsettle things in rather odd ways. If more people use AI to draft emails they don’t particularly want to write, we end up with a game of bureaucratic “mime”: everyone performing sincerity and quietly outsourcing it, and no one entirely sure how much of their inbox was actually written by a human.

The labour of email was never just about crafting sentences. It’s always been the scanning, the sorting and the deciding. AI doesn’t remove this burden. If anything, it amplifies it. When everything arrives polished, everything looks important. That points to a deeper question for the future of work: if AI can perform responsiveness, why are we generating so many situations that still require it?

Looking forward

What would a workplace look like if email wasn’t the default solution to every coordination problem? Perhaps fewer performative check-ins, “just touching base”, “looping you in” or “following up on the below”. More clearer expectations about what actually requires a response, and what doesn’t.

From RTÉ Radio 1’s The Business in 2017, it time to put email in the junk folder?

Email, like paper, is likely to persist for good reasons. It is simple, flexible and universal. It allows things to be deferred, revisited, forwarded and quietly ignored. But if AI is going to change any of this, my hope is that it makes visible how much of this is ritual, how much is habit, and how much has long been unnecessary.

And if the machines are happy to keep saying “hope this finds you well” to each other, we might finally have permission to stop. The Conversation

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Daniel Angus is a professor of Digital Communication and director of QUT Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. This article was originally published by The Conversation.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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