Who’s the dummy?

I was reading Joanna Stern’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the new AI features that Apple is rushing to complete for the iPhone 16s. (Can’t LLMs debug their own code? I thought that was a done deal.) Among the promised features is a Rewrite function that will translate your messages and other writings into different styles of prose. One style is called Professional. Stern tested it on a note she was writing to her mom. Here’s the original:

I’ll be home tomorrow. 

Here’s how it reads after the rewrite:

I anticipate returning home tomorrow.

So, if I’m getting this right, you’d use Professional mode any time you want to sound like you have a stick up your ass. I anticipate forgoing its deployment.

This is all very silly, or at least would be if we hadn’t lost our collective mind. For years now, we’ve been acclimating ourselves to having machines speak on our behalf. It began with autocorrect and autoedit functions in word processors and has continued through ever more aggressive autocomplete functions on phones. Having an app fiddle with your writing now seems normal, even necessary given how much time we all spend messaging, posting, and commenting. The endless labor of self-expression cries out for the efficiency of automation.

We don’t even care that computers, despite years of experience, still do a crappy job of what would seem to be pretty simple algorithmic work. Here’s a sloppy text that I wrote with the aid of my messaging app. It’s filled with typos, weird punctuation, and bizarre word substitutions, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist. If not, who cares? Along with speeding up exchanges, the implicit it’s autocomplete’s fault! excuse that now accompanies every messy text has the added benefit of covering up the fact that we can’t be bothered to spend five seconds proofreading the messages we send to friends and family members. We’ve got headlines to read, YouTubes to watch.

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT two years ago, people have taken to using it for all sorts of formal writing tasks, from college papers to corporate memos to government reports. I was recently talking with a Methodist bishop, and she told me that a colleague now uses generative AI to help him write sermons. Apple’s Rewrite, and the similar writing tools being introduced by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others, extends the AI-based outsourcing of personal speech into more intimate areas, shaping the way we talk with the people closest to us. It may start with rewriting—to help us “deliver the right words to meet the occasion,” as Apple describes it—but it will soon expand into the automated production of condolence messages, wedding vows, and the like. LLMs give us ventriloquism in reverse. The mechanical dummy speaks through your mouth.

It’s also the next stage in the long-running industrialization of human communication—one of the subjects of my forthcoming book Superbloom. For nearly two centuries, we’ve embraced the relentless speeding up of communication by mechanical means, believing that the industrial ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization are as applicable to speech as to the manufacture of widgets. More recently, we’ve embraced the mechanization of editing, allowing software to replace people in choosing the information we see (and don’t see). With LLMs, the industrialization ethic moves at last into the creation of the very content of our speech.

It’s hard to know what to say. Why not make it easier? Or, as Apple Rewrite Professional puts it: The rendering of thoughts into prose is one on the most challenging endeavors in which a human being can engage. It would be advisable to subject the task to a process of simplification.