So yes, it feels impersonal, and while it's fine to lean on it to correct errors or perhaps help you articulate something you're struggling with, it has no place in interpersonal communication between human beings with any relationship outside of the purely professional.
Plus, it's really tacky.
A hand written email used to signal the same - that somebody took the time and effort to craft a thoughtful email to you, and holds you in high enough regard to make an investment like that.
Nowadays its utterly impossible to tell.
Now that GenAI has devalued (alternatively, read: ‘democratised’) prose, the best costly signal will be to go to great lengths to show you haven’t used AI. Whatever it can’t do will become by-definition more valuable.
But to me, there needs to be some small element of individualism. “Democratic” is partially about each person being able to share their own voice.
In that sense, it centralizes prose, since the user adopts the voice of OpenAI.
I remember when a hand written letter literally meant a hand written letter. Preferably in tidy cursive. Some viewed it as more personal. Others viewed it as a reflection of thought and effort.
It is easy to say that AI is different. I don't even like it when my email client attempts to auto-complete the current word, never mind the next few words, because it wasn't my word. It makes me feel even worse if it was going to be my word. (If what I was going to say is that predictable, is it even worth saying?)
Yet that shift in values over handwritten letters leads me to think there will be a shift in values regarding AI written letters. It doesn't take much imagination to to realize that someone is going to tell an AI agent to write birthday greetings to each of their friends, then send it off on their birthday.
> The AI did, however, try to sound like someone. It was folksy and upbeat, talky and pretend-excited
I've not seen an LLM, even when fine tuned that doesn't actually do that (Chinese LLMs excepted). There's something just inherently American about the instruction datasets that these LLMs are instructed with.
So just prompt it a little bit and spend maybe 300 to 800 words talking in the style you want it to emulate. And have an extended conversation where you nail in the style.
I bet you can do this to make it write in British, Australian, or Indian English styles. But I'm perhaps not really equipped to judge, since I don't know those styles natively.
That’s why you add golden syrup (or maple if you’re Canadian/American). I’m not sure what the AI equivalent is.
You don't get that from AI. You get boring neatly paragraphed prose. It's like tidying up a room that is already tidy.
All of this is stuff that good writers have to do as well... They can just as easily get stuck making meaningless edits to well tidied but unsatisfying prose - so-called polishing the turd. They also have to get the sledgehammer out sometimes.
So either be destructive and rip out and reimagine whole sections, or tell the AI to help you do it. If you get it "having fun", and have fun with it yourself, you can get some really cool and satisfying stuff!
AI can take on any writing style of any character you desire. It can be extremely vibrant. It can be cold and calculating. It can produce beautiful prose. You can train it on your texts or emails and have it produce something indistinguishable from your own writing style. It’s completely up to the prompting (And the tuning of the model) what output it’s going to produce. The fact that someone was lazy with their use of AI isn’t the AI’s fault.
I would be actually delighted and touched to receive a genuinely type-written letter since I know that actually owning and maintaining and using such archaic equipment is an effort far in excess of hand writing a letter.
Yes, it loses the expressiveness of actual hand writing, but I'd be happy that people were still using the cantankerous things.
You're making a flawed comparison there. It boils down to style.
Style is a personal thing, it comes from your word-choices and the rhythm of your writing, which results from how you feel, your education and interests, what audience you're trying to reach, your lived experience, whether there's a 3 year old trying to show you that he can eat a bug.
Now, of course, a hand-written letter has a greater expressive capacity: you have paper choices, ink or pencil or crayon, your hand-writing either natural or emphasised. A type-writer can't capture that, but the words you type are still a reflection of you.
AI makes few of these considerations, and is unable to convincingly emulate them.
Strongly recommend you read Don Watson's Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language for a good comparison of the bland paste we get fed by institutions (and AI) and robust writing from the heart meant to persuade or reflect feelings.
I suspect that an LLM would do a good job at figuring out what parts of a given text are "interesting" by detecting how unexpected it is. The parts that are expected are the parts we usually skim over and don't pay much attention to, but when we hit something new and unusual, we slow down and turn on the critical thinking part of our brain.
I also find filler text super tedious to write, so am a huge fan of using LLMs for any sort of long form communication. My typical writing style jumps around a lot and assume that the reader can follow it.