Imagine a couple, a very happy couple. The wife gets and sends texts with her husband every day, multiple times through out the day. They’re cute and they’re funny. Sometimes they’re deep and endearing. They trade their secrets with one another in these texts. She loves the texts because they’re a side of him she doesn’t always see. Playful and random. He seems to reminisce about a lot of the time they did get to spend together, and promise her the dreams they have been working towards are coming. It makes her happy. She remembers when they were like that with each other all of the time. He’s often pretty worn out from all his time at the company by the time he gets home and on the weekends he seems to be taking more client calls than ever. He’s just very busy these days, but that makes the random little thoughtful texts throughout his overly long workdays all the more meaningful, because she knows he’s always thinking of her. She treasures the texts, but most of all, she treasures him.
One day, she wants to surprise him at the office. She just wants to bring him a working lunch. She sees through a couple of layers of glass that he’s giving a presentation, and maybe she shouldn’t interrupt, but she just texts him anyway, so when he turns to look at his phone, he can at least know she’s there and maybe wave to her while she waits in the lobby.
At the exact same moment her text goes through, some other guy at the table picks up a phone. She knows the man is her husband’s executive assistant. The assistant types something on the phone and when he sets it down again— ping! An endearing message comes up on her phone. She has seen her husband continue the presentation without a pause and he was certainly not typing on his phone.
It dawns on her. Her husband has been paying someone else to text her all this time.
When her husband leaves the meeting, she confronts him. She wants to know why he’s got someone else texting her, and for how long it’s been going on. Were all of the texts from the assistant? Has any of their texting conversation been real?
He tells her that the reason he has paid someone else to text her is that he wants her to feel special and that he just wouldn’t do it at all if it were left to him on his own time, and besides, his assistant is far better at that kind of thing. The assistant has a Masters in Literature studies, and a side business where he does this for all of the guys in the office.
He even gave his assistant all of their years of personal emails and correspondence to go over so that the texts would sound just like him and be tailored around their relationship and the assistant would know all of their inside jokes and pet names and trips and private moments. In fact, the first texts were all vetted by him, to make sure that the texts were really tuned in perfectly. All the words his assistant said, he paid for, so they’re really from him. It’s the same or better than pre-printed cards, even a cut above reprinted love sonnets! Why it’s practically a private ghost writing service, just as if he had done it himself and dictated it word for word.
He tells all this to his wife, while she’s just standing there, take out bag hanging from her wrist, her mouth agog.
Seeing how stunned she is, the husband assumes he’s made her speechless with his brilliance. He continues and says that she wouldn’t believe the trouble he went to to train the assistant and how much he’s paid for it. The service is truly top notch and it’s really competitive, lots of other assistants can do this now-a-days, too. Enough that they’re forming venture capital firms and getting investors so they can scale it up, maybe build big call centers with scores of assistants dedicated solely to texting people’s spouses. Why, if they can get enough specialists, they might even write people’s essays and free up overworked college kids! They can even expand the business to emailing mothers, which everyone knows is a real chore. There’s one religious guy in the office who uses his assistant to write his personal prayers and his confessionals. He wants to have his assistant write a memoir for him too. Maybe spice it up a little, make it interesting. With this service, it’ll even be possible to make travel blogs about places you’ve never been to and food you’ve never eaten and concerts you couldn’t even get tickets to and really transport people into those experiences you’ve never had! Can you imagine, he says, what it would have been like if this service had existed when we wrote our wedding vows? Your Dad died last year, but we can give one of these special assistants all of his letters too, and then you can text with your dad again.
Anyway, the husband tells her, he’s been an early adopter because he has keen business insight like that and all the money and effort he spent is going to make this visionary service available to even more people in the future. In fact, he can get her an assistant to text for her too, if she wants! Their assistants can message one another and that would really free her up to pursue her own career. The texts have been getting rather long, anyway, and probably they could pay a third assistant to just summarize all the messages into one brief bullet point page every week.
The husband tells her she should be happy he thought to set this up for her. She liked it after all, and that makes it not just okay; her having liked it and not being able to spot the difference is proof that it was truly amazing writing. If it convinced her for so long that he was texting her, then it is as good as him having texted her. Better, in fact. He may even be learning a thing or two from his assistant’s texts, when he happens to read some of them. That’s improving him as a person, he adds, making him a better person for her.
When she divorces him he is really shocked at her ungratefulness.
AI was not used in the writing of this story, not even a little (heck, I even checked my own spelling) and yet the whole thing has been inspired by all of my own encounters with people using it. AI wasn’t used to write this, but it is the entire premise.
Don’t use AI in personal communications or creative works where you are signing and presumed to be the sole author. Your own time and attention and your own words are far more valuable than anything auto generated by a prompt.
Also be mindful to read the original words of the people you care about, and not just AI summaries. If you aren’t going to read their words, then be honest that you haven’t gotten around to it and you need their own tl;dr version until you can read it. And then make time for them like you promised. Be honest and stop faking.
Respect your friends and family. And as RPG writers, make sure you respect the AI guidelines of your GMs and attribute clearly. None of these excuses hold water. No one likes being ‘fooled’ by AI usage when they believe they are connecting with you.