Not the same size

AI is a very efficient engine for generating the cruel version of what you already think. Hand it a grievance and it hands back a sharper one, in your own voice, faster than you could have managed alone. That’s a fair thing to hold against it.

I found out this summer that it runs the other direction too.

I’d sent a few cold emails about an app I’d built, written with AI help, and one came back from a writer I admire saying the message was obviously machine-made. Noise. I had my reply half-built before I finished reading his: decades of books with my name on the spine, laid out politely, with a cool little dismount at the end. It was the most satisfying thing I’d composed in months, and every line of it was about me.

Instead of the reply box I opened a chat with the thing I’d been accused of hiding behind and asked whether I was overreacting. It said I was. He had criticized an unsolicited email, and I was preparing to defend my life’s work, and those were not the same size. I sent something short, with a joke at my own expense.

It never slowed me down. I could have hit Send at any point. It disagreed with me, which is a thing a delay has never once done. The technique, such as it is: before you send the reply you’re proudest of, ask the machine whether the thing you’re defending is the same size as the thing that got hit.

One afternoon is all the evidence I have, and it left me less sure which way this tool cuts, or for whom: