When I was still a young man, and I was attempting to figure out how to make girls like me back, I would sometimes buy those greeting cards. There was this store, not too far from my house that sold them.
The owner of this little store was friends with my grandma, so she was always helpful when I was on my mission. Showing me the new ones, the more cutesy ones, and what not.
Since I was courting girls (i was 13,14) it was a cheat code of sorts. A cute little animal, a short poem, etc. The process made sense to me back then, because I was still rather inept about it all.
As I got older, I understood or at least I think I did, the silliness of the act. Me, walking into a store, looking at cards someone else wrote, finding one that feels "good" and then signing my name on it. "yeah, that sounds like something i would have liked to come up with"
As you can imagine, I stopped buying the things. I began writing poetry, songs, letters, etc. Otherwise, it felt like I was selling smoke. "this is who I am!" didn't mean crap. I was simply saying "hey, i spend money on you".
Where am I going with this?
Well, this whole AI to help people connect with other people feels somewhat similar to me. But listen, I get the difficulty some people have to connect with others. Its not that rare to be honest. More so because we live in an online existence, and in this online existence connections are conveniently disposable.
But in an already connected, yet disconnected world, we are in danger of exacerbating the contradictiveness of the picture even more. I say its ok to be flawed, to be a little inept expressing one's emotions. I let a wart survive my combing of my writing. Its a way to keep it honest, keep it human.
If you and I ever meet in real life, I won't be a surprise to you. Its just be me with sounds, instead of letters in a screen. That, to me at least, is worth the effort.
Now, do I judge people who are using AI harshly? No, not really. I know why this is happening, I'm not blind to the realities that are pushing us into that direction. But I also think that for the sake of ourselves, we ought to fight back, even if its just a little bit.
We're being pushed into that direction for sure although sometimes, I still think human could fight back because as the moment we speak, AI doesn't have its own consciousness therefore critical thinking and our emotion remains to be our strenght. Oh and imperfection just once again is another character of human and in the age of AI, that needs to be emphasizes too.