How AI Helps Me Not Be a Dick

I make things, and I have always been bad at the part that comes after.

The part where you turn around and tell people the thing exists, that they should download it or play it or read it because it’s so fantastically awesome. For most of a career I got to avoid learning how bad I was at marketing, because somebody else did the telling, or nobody did and the work sat quiet, which is frustrating at times but is what it is. A thing nobody buys because nobody heard about it is a failure you get to rationalize as a preference.

That stopped being available this year, when I decided to try something new.

The reluctant part

So I did the thing I dread. After launching a web site and app called Citizen’s Daily Brief, which I’d spent months on, I made myself write to strangers about it. Not many. A handful of cold emails, each one composed with the specific stomach-knot that rides along with the discomfort of asking a stranger to judge you. I wrote them with AI help, the way I write most things now, which mostly means I knew what I wanted to say and used the machine to stop circling it. I don’t have it think for me, I use it like a fancier spellcheck.

One of the replies came back hot.

A writer whose work I’ve admired, someone I’d read long before I had any reason to email him, wrote back to say the message was obviously machine-made. Inauthentic. The kind of thing that ruins the party for everyone by adding noise, so the next real words from a real person arrive already under suspicion.

I should be fair to him, because he wasn’t wrong about the trend. The slop is rising. I’ve deleted the same kind of mail he was describing, and felt the same flat little contempt he was feeling when he hit reply. He was making a reasonable complaint about a real thing, aimed at a person who was guilty of about half of it. I had used the machine, which I’ll own. I’d also read his article, and the email said which part of it I was writing about and why, which is a thing slop never bothers to do. But like I said, it was hot. Very hot.

The lump

Here’s what happened in my chest, which is why I’m writing this.

I have written, by a count I did once against my own book history, six million published words. In print. Forty-seven books with spines and my name on them. Shelves that still existed when I filled them. Decades of getting sentences to work with nothing helping me but coffee, time, and Microsoft Word. And I was being told, on the evidence of one email, that I was the noise. A cheater, specifically.

The desire to return fire was total, and immediate, and it arrived fully formed. I had the reply half-built before I’d finished reading his: the résumé, laid out politely. The correction. The cool little dismount at the end that would put him in his place while appearing to thank him for his time. You wanna see human writing, fella? I am locked and loaded. No machine help required. I can still see the shape of it. I even get a little flushed retelling it to be honest. It was, by some distance, the most satisfying thing I’d composed in months, and every single line of it was about me.

Somebody criticized an artifact I made, and my instinct was to answer with weaponized credentials. Do you know who I am is not an argument. It’s the oldest dick move there is, and I was two clicks from making it to a person whose work I genuinely like.

I should say, in case the calibration I do in public gives the wrong impression, that I am good at this. Fantasy leagues, private message boards, the group text where the whole point is to bust your friends until one of them breaks. I’ve been talking trash recreationally for as long as I’ve had friends who could take it, and I’m confident in the skill the way I’m confident on a bike. What was new that afternoon was that I was reaching for it in earnest.

The ledge

Instead of the reply box, I opened a chat with the machine I was being accused of hiding behind.

I didn’t ask it to write the response. I asked it, more or less, whether I was crazy. In fact, there’s no more or less about it, I actually asked if my reply was crazy. Whether the email had actually been that bad. Whether I was being treated unfairly. “Mr. Robot, please tell me if I’m overreacting because I know I’m not thinking clearly.”

It didn’t take my side, which I knew was coming. It told me my draft was defensive, which it was. It pointed out that the man had criticized a piece of unsolicited email and I was preparing to defend my life’s work, and that those were not the same size. It suggested the accusation might be about an artifact rather than about my worth, and that I could concede the artifact without conceding anything else. Then it helped me find a register that was gracious and still recognizably mine, which took a while, because the first three attempts were gracious in the way a hostage is gracious.

In the end I sent something short. I even managed to make a joke at my expense. He never wrote back. That’s the least interesting part of the story.

The mirrors

The shape of it is worth one paragraph and no more.

An AI-assisted email, sent to promote an app I built, got slammed for being AI-assisted. And the thing I reached for to keep from answering a small cruelty with a larger one was the same AI. The tool accused of making me less human is what made me more human that afternoon.

That’s ironic, sure. I think it’s also just what the tool is.

What it actually did

It did not write my feelings for me or fake my voice. I was hurt, and a little pissed. It granted me that. And then helped me find my own way through it.

Before there was a machine to ask, I’d have run the draft past my wife, and plenty of times I still do. The tool went on the short list of people I check myself against, and everybody who was on the list before is still on it. Which cuts the other way too, and I should be honest about it: if she’d been out that afternoon, I don’t know that the hot version stays in the drafts folder.

Mercifully, it never told me I was right.

What it gave me was a pause. A buffer between the impulse and the send, which is the same service a good friend performs when they read your furious draft and say, gently, maybe you should sleep on it.

I wrote a whole essay about the disappearance of that kind of gap, and The Wait Was the Review draws a line at the end of it that I want to pick up here. Friction only ever supplied time. A counterparty who can push back supplies judgment. Those are different missing pieces, and that essay was only about the time. This is the other one. The machine didn’t slow me down that afternoon; I could have clicked Send at any moment. It disagreed with me, which is a thing a delay has never once done.

There’s a temperament this connects to, and I’ll state it without dressing it up. I’m slow to conclude. Some people call that overthinking. Maybe they’re right. I hold both sides longer than most people find comfortable, and I’ve been told more than once that it reads as hedging or as a failure of conviction. It isn’t. It’s the most humane instinct I own, and it gets dropped the instant I feel insulted. What the machine did was hand it back to me at the exact moment I’d dropped it. Mostly against my will, I should add.

Which suggests something about who should worry. The people most convinced that these tools will make us less human are frequently the ones concluding fastest and firing first. The machine is a very efficient engine for generating the cruel version of what you already think. It is also, on a good day, the cool collected third party who calmly says maybe not that one. Or that one. Maybe that one. I don’t know a way to make anybody choose the right one, the humane one, and the choosing is the whole thing.

What I actually know

I have one afternoon’s worth of evidence, that’s all.

I don’t know that this generalizes. I know that a man whose work I admire thought I was noise, that he had a point, and that he scored a direct hit in his response to me. I also know my first instinct was to hurt him back a little, and that I didn’t. I can’t tell you that you should always pull a punch that is cocked and ready to land, perhaps even earned, but I can tell you that sometimes not throwing the punch is fucking exhilarating.

I still struggle to sell my projects to strangers. I still hate the hustle, still find the whole apparatus of telling people my work exists a little humiliating, and I suppose I will keep sending awkward emails badly for as long as I keep making things. I’ll keep letting the machine help me send them, too, because they come out better and the stomach-knot is the same either way.

But I’ve stopped assuming I know which way the tool cuts. I always figured that whatever these things were going to cost me or hand me, it would be something to do with the making. What it caught me being, on a Tuesday afternoon, was somebody about to be mean. And it helped me be better than that.