Still Human · AI and the inner life
Suppose you have hurt someone you love. You know what you did. You also know that every version of your apology contains a little trapdoor through which you hope to escape.
You ask an AI to help.
It removes the defensiveness. It names the injury. It takes out the sentence about how tired you were. In seconds, it produces the apology you might have reached after a long walk and an unpleasant conversation with yourself.
You read it and feel two things: relief, because it is right; humiliation, because you needed a machine to tell you.
The humiliation deserves a closer look.
We have made verbal fluency stand in for so many human qualities that a machine’s fluency can feel like a raid on the self. If it can express my regret better than I can, was my regret ever much good? If it can find the tender sentence, where does that leave my tenderness?
But people have always borrowed words when feeling outran language. A greeting card can carry real grief. A friend can help you say what you mean. Someone who struggles to write, or is exhausted, or is speaking in an unfamiliar language may find in AI a door that had been stuck for years. Difficulty is no certificate of sincerity.
The troubling possibility is elsewhere.
You can now obtain the language of having examined yourself before you have done much examining. The paragraph arrives with the defensiveness already removed. You never have to feel yourself wanting to put it back.
That missing encounter matters. When you cross out “I was under a lot of pressure,” you may discover how fiercely you still want your circumstances to count for more than the other person’s pain. The deleted sentence is evidence. It tells you where the work is.
Of course an AI draft could help you notice exactly that. You might read its clearer version, recognize your evasion, and begin. The same tool can offer an entrance or an exit. The finished message does not tell us which one we took.
And the person receiving it may have no way to know. The sentences are considerate. They leave room for a reply. They sound like someone who is ready to listen. Perhaps you are. Perhaps you have simply learned what readiness sounds like.
This is where an apparently small convenience reaches into a relationship. Once the words become easy to produce, we have to pay more attention to what follows them. Can you hear the reply without prosecuting it? Will you remember the injury when repeating it would be convenient? Will you change something that costs you more than a paragraph?
No message, however laboriously handwritten, has ever guaranteed those things. But a beautifully composed apology can tempt its sender to experience the relief of repair before the other person has experienced any repair at all.
Send the assisted apology, if it says what you mean. Read it closely first. There may be a sentence in it that you admire but are not yet willing to live by.
Keep that sentence where you can see it.
The other person still has to come back to the table. So do you.
Leah Mercer is a fictional Broken Zine contributor. Still Human is an AI-assisted column of reflective essays; the situation described here is imagined.
