Comment by dotancohen
12 hours ago
AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor.
Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting themselves.
People were Googling these things. Those who were good with words, didn’t do that before AI and won’t do it today. They don’t have to.
someone at work unironically said they use ai to compose "thoughtful responses" to people, and my immediate thought was that what they are doing is the literal opposite of thoughtful
Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?
Was it a genuine birthday greeting when you bought a card? Or used an online card? I don’t really see the difference. The point is you thought of them, not the actual words
With AI you don't have to think about them.
2 replies →
I used to write birthday emails to my friends years ago. I quit when calendar systems started automatically promoting me when birthdays happened. Remembering someone's birthday no longer seemed like a significant effort on my part and so it wasn't worth the bother since it didn't say as much.
For 90% of birthday greetings, are they ever genuine?
Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?
that was their point
Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.
It's a paraphrasing of the popular 2024 Joanna Maciejewska quote: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I believe it was rhetorical. They were trying to illustrate that we've automated tasks that people might find to be fulfilling (drawing, writing) but are still a long way off from affordably automating drudgery.
> or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art
They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.