Sorry AI, you’re just not human enough

Rather late in the day, there’s a very real human pushback against having to interact with AI communication, which now comes at us from every direction. Hostinger, a hosting and infrastructure company, analysed a billion anonymized emails and found only 13% of the lot were human-written. Considering it isn’t just email, but text messages, calls, social media posts, comments and articles that are AI-generated, it is unsurprisingly getting exhausting for humans, who invented the stuff in the first place.

In some situations, that will work, provided safety measures are in place. When the need is to get a specific and routine task done, such as letting you know a bill is paid or needs to be paid, booking a hotel for a business trip, or checking if something you bought is ready, agent-to-agent communication will do the trick. But some occasions call for greater human contact than others, and as long as users make sure that those are not AI-written, beyond perhaps grammar and typos, they won’t cross the line into causing hurt, offence and sheer fatigue.

If you’re familiar with how people invite each other to weddings in India, you’ll notice how annoyed invitees are on merely receiving a digital card. They expect personal contact, a phone call or two or three, possibly a visit and a box of sweets, and sometimes don’t turn up because there wasn’t enough human effort put into the invite.

When there’s not-so-happy news, and it’s time to send a condolence message, an AI-generated note of digital empathy will lead to lifelong hurt. Although AI can churn out linguistically acceptable messages, one can sense the lack of a human heartbeat behind the words.

In February 2023, Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School sent an email to its student body following a tragic mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of three people. The email was intended to offer deep condolences and reassure students about campus safety. But the email caused immediate outrage because a disclaimer at the bottom revealed that the message had been paraphrased using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Students were deeply insulted by the irony of using a machine to communicate about empathy and human connection during a time of tragedy. And one can hardly blame them.

In a world where communication is becoming effortless, effort itself may become the signal. The slightly awkward message, the personal reference, the unmistakable human touch, these may begin to matter more, not less.

You can outsource many things, but emotional effort isn’t on the list. Human relationships are, after all, built on the concept that a message involves a mind-to-mind connection.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.