By now, it’s more or less a foregone conclusion that AI will constitute a major part of our lives in the near future. Whether we like it or not, it has already become a key part of the economy and continues to transform the way we produce and consume. Nevertheless, a line must drawn somewhere to preserve whatever is left of our humanity after all this progress, and that line should be using AI in our texts, social media posts, and emails.

Like most people, I am now inundated daily with AI-generated verbal content from everyone inside and outside my social circles, all filled with the same corporate jargon, bland observations, predictable cadences, positive cliches, and yes, those infamous em dashes that AI seems to love.

Of course, many people would see this as an improvement. An AI-written missive saves today’s workers the tedium of professional communication, filtering out the typos and objectionable phrasing, and the receivers of such emails will be spared the headache of making sense of bad writing.

Similarly, AI can help a user navigate through more serious situations, where clarity and sensitivity are essential. No one wants the other person, especially a romantic partner or good friend, to think they are inarticulate or tone-deaf.

Keep It Human

However, when it comes to any communication, even of the most quotidian sort, it is best to keep it human. As writer Marc Barnes explains in a recent essay:

Conversation is for communion. The ability to speak and to listen, to discuss, to reveal our hidden, intellectual life by articulating ourselves in a public, common language with the hope of receiving a response — all this has as its natural correlate in another intelligence, one who receives our meaning, understands it (or misunderstands it), and has the power to respond in kind, revealing the hidden reality of his or her own subjectivity.

In other words, the main reason people communicate is because they believe their interlocutors are fellow human beings. Even if I am sending a reminder to attend a meeting or reading some promotional email for an educational product, I have to believe that there is another human soul at the other end. If it’s machine-produced slop, I will stop caring.

Already, there is far too much verbal garbage cluttering our conversations, inboxes, and messaging apps. Modern society has conditioned people to standardize their expression as much as possible through templates and formulae. While this can sometimes help with clarity and development for young people — I fully endorse the five-paragraph essay — the convenience of these pre-set structures can lead to mindless (and thus meaningless) production of text. The use of ChatGPT is the next phase, automating and expediting this whole approach to communication.

Over time, the standardization and atomization of communication has caused people today to aggressively filter all the information they receive. So much time is now spent cutting through excess mass-produced verbiage that this activity has become a major part of people’s daily routines. Thus, the idea of saving time with the help of AI even in a professional context ironically ends up taking more time and brainpower overall because of the need to sort through ever more meaningless text.

Deeper Relationships

On a personal level, the use of AI is disastrous. Few things can be more humiliating and insulting than finding out one was talking to computer software instead of an actual person. Whether users intend it or not, they are signaling to the other person that he or she is not worthy of an authentic verbal exchange. Even basic small talk demands full human participation since it forms the basis of a deeper relationships. If so much of this is handled by AI, new friendships will never form and even the old friendships will deteriorate.

Academically, it should go without saying that using AI actively destroys thinking. The kind of development and refinement of ideas that only happens when composing an essay or even writing a paragraph never happens. Consequently, users’ thoughts will remain largely unformed and crude even as they reach adulthood. As Jordan Peterson once put it in his excellent guide on writing, “if you want to have a life characterized by competence, productivity, security, originality and engagement rather than one that is nasty, brutish and short, you need to think carefully about important issues. There is no better way to do so than to write.”

Tech Companies and Decline of Humanities

So why allow AI to do this in the first place? One major reason is because tech companies force it down users’ throat. As Ted Gioia documents, so many of them “bundle” AI into their services so they “can pretend that users have totally embraced the new tech” when they haven’t. Even though no one asked to have AI help them write an email or respond to a text, these companies include it in their products anyway.

Another major reason is that people have become collectively worse at disciplines that emphasize reading, writing, and thinking, otherwise known as the humanities. Although most of them may technically be “literate,” their reading comprehension and ability to verbalize complete thoughts are so poor, they cannot functionally communicate. Normally, such people would remedy this problem through regular practice and taking classes. Now, they can just use AI, not just to write for them but even to read for them.

Making Us Less than Human

Yet this crutch will inevitably worsen people’s original incompetence and prevent them from connecting with others. They will never know what they actually know or about anything going on around them. And not only will this make them bad workers, but bad people in general. Why befriend or go out with a person so hollowed out when he or she is effectively an AI chatbot?

The problems of depending on AI to speak for us go deep. As writer Grayson Quay argues in his new book The Transhumanist Temptation, the uses of AI technology turns what was commonly understood as human nature into something less than human — though transhumanists will maintain such technology makes one more than human. Instead of being defined by nature, people are increasingly defined by these artificial enhancements. Not surprisingly, as this has happens, populations in the developed world have become progressively sadder.

So, for the good of our humanity, let’s communicate without the AI-helpers. Yes, it may expose our ignorance, our awkwardness, or general disregard for grammar, but it will be real, and this is what matters most of all.