Recently, I had a birthday! The birthday was quiet, filled with all kinds of introverted heaven such as good podcasts to listen to, quiet phone calls of love and bliss with my found family, and, of course, some freaking divine holds came in from my many nonresident libraries I subscribe to yearly instead of paying for an Audible subscription.
All in all, chefs kiss perfect! Just as I got into bed for the night, though, my phone dinged.
It was a text message from one of my racialized friends. I always love getting texts from him because it’s usually accompanied by some amazing audio recording of wherever he’s at or what he is doing. And, well, I’m quite the sucker for accents so I love hearing his voice.
As usual, it was an admittedly sexy but cute happy birthday audio, first sang in English, then Spanish, I presumed? Google tells me Dominican men’s native language is Spanish, but I made a note to research that later because I suspected the answer was either simplistic or wrong somehow.
Sidenote, I never thought I’d be an adult second guessing basic links Google shares with me, but here we are!
Halfway through the cute audio, I got a message from one of my friends, Karen.
The message, right away, didn’t sound like her writing at all. I opened up her thread to discover the following.
Dear Robert,
I wanted to take a moment to wish you a very happy birthday! On your special day, I hope you’re surrounded by loved ones, good food, and maybe even a few new ideas for your writing.
As a writer, you have a gift for crafting words that transport and inspire others. Your unique perspective and talents are a treasure, and I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to read and enjoy your work.
Here’s to another year of creativity, productivity, and making your mark on the world through your writing! I hope your birthday is as bright and wonderful as you are.
Warm regards,Karren.
There was something deeply AI about that text. Firstly, it clearly was supposed to be an email, but moreover, Karren never, ever, ever! Used the phrase, warm regards. She didn’t even use it in corporate settings.
I didn’t have to read the whole thing over again to tell it was a generated happy birthday message. All the signs of LLM writing were there, plagued all throughout! Karren didn’t have any Disabilities that made writing difficult for her, in fact, she was temporarily abled.
I know she reads my blog, so I know she knows my thoughts about tech and AI, so I didn’t understand why she was fucking with me this way.
I messaged her back.
“Hey, nice one! You got me, HA! You fucked with me really good!”
The reply wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Sad face emoji. What do you mean fucking with you? I was sincere! I wanted to tell you happy Birthday but I wanted to have AI do it.”
“Why?” I shot back, instantly annoyed.
“Because I didn’t know how to make it lengthy. Plus, it’s just easier.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. I just sat there, stunned. The last sentence repeating itself in my head.
It’s just easier. It’s just easier. It’s. Just. Easier.
I didn’t know how to reply to that, and, honestly, I still don’t know how to reply to that. The text still remains read, with not even a draft reply below the text message area. Nothing stands in its wake.
Both I and Karen are busy people. We catch up digitally more in person, but even so, the point of friendship, I thought, was to challenge those ideas of perfect friends. Friendships were there to make you understand others by being around them and getting to know them, even in their tired and angry and imperfect days. Friendships aren’t supposed to be perfect. They’re just supposed to last, and they don’t even have to be stunning or even swell friendships. They just have to keep us learning new things and learning, every day. I wanted to see a tired typo in her email from a hard days work. I wanted her to mix up my age. I wanted to see the imperfections in the tired as fuck email because the fact she still wrote to me, even though she was tired and would’ve wrote down my incorrect age, the fact that she thought about me enough to craft something personal would have made everything worth it.
Even if I were to pretend to enjoy AI, I really sat there wondering how do pro AI people feel when they get an email/SMS like that. Do they feel anything? Do they just think, ah yes, my good friend Jamaal is productively remembering my birthday! I’m going to thank him for sounding white in more than one sentence!
But in all seriousness, I wish I could be a fly on the wall so I can witness and record what happens when these lovingly enthusiastic AI evangelists get an email from a friend that wasn’t even written by them. Something tells me they don’t even stop to pause. They just have their AI summarize the email, then tell it to compose a reply. It’s as if they want to have the idea of humans around but don’t want to be reminded of blood, skin, and, well, melanin.
I went back to my Dominican friends audio and played it on repeat the whole night. It helped me get to sleep. It was what humans should be. Unracialized, free from politics, of hardships, of bracketed human experiences. It was one soul, caring for another, to gift me with a happy Birthday song in his native language after the English version. It didn’t matter I couldn’t understand the language. I could hear his heart loud and clear, and that’s something I never want to give up.