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How to lose friends and alienate people with AI

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Five hours is enough time to watch a New York Mets game. It is enough time to listen to the Spice Girls’ “Spice” album (40 minutes), Paul Simon’s “Paul Simon” album (42 minutes) and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (his longest). It is enough time to roast a chicken, text your friends that you’ve roasted a chicken and prepare for an impromptu dinner party.

Or you could spend it checking your email. Five hours is about how long many workers spend on email each day. And 90 minutes on the messaging platform Slack.

It’s a weird thing, workplace chatter such as email and Slack: It’s sometimes the most delightful and human part of the workday. It can also be mind-numbing to manage your inbox — to the extent you might wonder: Couldn’t a robot do this?

In late April, I decided to see what it would be like to let artificial intelligence into my life. I resolved to do an experiment. For one week, I would write all my work communication — emails, Slack messages, pitches, follow-ups with sources — through ChatGPT, the AI language model from the research lab OpenAI. I didn’t tell colleagues until the end of the week (except in a few instances of personal weakness). I downloaded a Chrome extension that drafted email responses directly into my inbox. But most of the time, I ended up writing detailed prompts into ChatGPT, asking it to be either witty or formal depending on the situation.

What resulted was a roller coaster, emotionally and in terms of the amount of content I was generating. I started the week inundating my teammates (sorry) to see how they would react. At a certain point, I lost patience with the bot and developed a newfound appreciation for phone calls.

My bot, unsurprisingly, couldn’t match the emotional tone of any online conversation. And I spend a lot of the week, because of hybrid work, having online conversations.

The impulse to chat with teammates all day isn’t wrong. Most people know the thrill (and also, usefulness) of office friendships from psychologists, economists, TV sitcoms and our own lives; my colleague sends me photos of her baby in increasingly chic onesies every few days, and nothing makes me happier. But the amount of time workers feel they must devote to digitally communicating is undoubtedly excessive — and for some, easy to make the case for handing over to AI.

The release of generative AI tools has raised all sorts of enormous and thorny questions about work. There are fears about what jobs will be replaced by AI in 10 years. Paralegals? Personal assistants? Movie and television writers are on strike, and one issue they’re fighting for is limiting the use of AI by the studios. There are also fears about the toxic and untruthful information AI can spread in an online ecosystem already rife with misinformation.

The question driving my experiment was far narrower: Will we miss our old ways of working if AI takes over the drudgery of communication? And would my colleagues even know, or would they be Chatfished?

My experiment started on a Monday morning with a friendly Slack message from an editor in Seoul, South Korea, who had sent me the link to a study analyzing humor across more than 2,000 TED and TEDx Talks. “Pity the researchers,” the editor wrote to me. I asked ChatGPT to say something clever in reply, and the robot wrote: “I mean, I love a good TED Talk as much as the next person, but that’s just cruel and unusual punishment!”

While not at all resembling a sentence I would type, this seemed inoffensive. I hit send.



Five hours is enough time to watch a New York Mets game. It is enough time to listen to the Spice Girls’ “Spice” album (40 minutes), Paul Simon’s “Paul Simon” album (42 minutes) and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (his longest). It is enough time to roast a chicken, text your friends that you’ve roasted a chicken and prepare for an impromptu dinner party.

Or you could spend it checking your email. Five hours is about how long many workers spend on email each day. And 90 minutes on the messaging platform Slack.

It’s a weird thing, workplace chatter such as email and Slack: It’s sometimes the most delightful and human part of the workday. It can also be mind-numbing to manage your inbox — to the extent you might wonder: Couldn’t a robot do this?

In late April, I decided to see what it would be like to let artificial intelligence into my life. I resolved to do an experiment. For one week, I would write all my work communication — emails, Slack messages, pitches, follow-ups with sources — through ChatGPT, the AI language model from the research lab OpenAI. I didn’t tell colleagues until the end of the week (except in a few instances of personal weakness). I downloaded a Chrome extension that drafted email responses directly into my inbox. But most of the time, I ended up writing detailed prompts into ChatGPT, asking it to be either witty or formal depending on the situation.

What resulted was a roller coaster, emotionally and in terms of the amount of content I was generating. I started the week inundating my teammates (sorry) to see how they would react. At a certain point, I lost patience with the bot and developed a newfound appreciation for phone calls.

My bot, unsurprisingly, couldn’t match the emotional tone of any online conversation. And I spend a lot of the week, because of hybrid work, having online conversations.

The impulse to chat with teammates all day isn’t wrong. Most people know the thrill (and also, usefulness) of office friendships from psychologists, economists, TV sitcoms and our own lives; my colleague sends me photos of her baby in increasingly chic onesies every few days, and nothing makes me happier. But the amount of time workers feel they must devote to digitally communicating is undoubtedly excessive — and for some, easy to make the case for handing over to AI.

The release of generative AI tools has raised all sorts of enormous and thorny questions about work. There are fears about what jobs will be replaced by AI in 10 years. Paralegals? Personal assistants? Movie and television writers are on strike, and one issue they’re fighting for is limiting the use of AI by the studios. There are also fears about the toxic and untruthful information AI can spread in an online ecosystem already rife with misinformation.

The question driving my experiment was far narrower: Will we miss our old ways of working if AI takes over the drudgery of communication? And would my colleagues even know, or would they be Chatfished?

My experiment started on a Monday morning with a friendly Slack message from an editor in Seoul, South Korea, who had sent me the link to a study analyzing humor across more than 2,000 TED and TEDx Talks. “Pity the researchers,” the editor wrote to me. I asked ChatGPT to say something clever in reply, and the robot wrote: “I mean, I love a good TED Talk as much as the next person, but that’s just cruel and unusual punishment!”

While not at all resembling a sentence I would type, this seemed inoffensive. I hit send.

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