Say what you want about AI, but one of its biggest effects on me has been reminding me how valuable human connection is.
Its second biggest effect might be making me suspicious of everyone's punctuation. Yes, I am thinking about em dashes. 😂
The joke works because the underlying feeling is familiar. We can generate a polished message in seconds. We can summarize, rewrite, and optimize almost anything we want to say. Yet a reply that sounds unmistakably like another person can feel more valuable than all of that polish.
Useful does not always mean personal
I like AI. I build with it. There are plenty of tasks I am happy to hand over: organizing information, improving a rough draft, and taking friction out of a routine workflow.
But I do not want efficiency to become the only measure of a conversation. A friend thinking out loud, an awkward pause, or someone changing their mind can be the interesting part.
Those moments show that somebody is actually there, doing the thinking with you.
Keep something of yourself in the message
When I use AI to edit, I want help making an idea clearer. I still want the opinion, uncertainty, humor, and occasionally questionable joke to be mine.
That applies to professional writing too. A perfectly smooth paragraph can be less memorable than a specific observation I actually believe. If I would never say a sentence out loud, that is a useful reason to rewrite it.
Use the tool to get closer
My favorite use of automation is removing the work that gets in the way of people connecting. Finding a meeting time is a good example. If a system can handle the back-and-forth, we can spend our time having the actual conversation.
Maybe that is the standard I want to keep: did the tool help me connect with someone, or did it replace the part I cared about?
I am excited about what AI can do. I am also increasingly grateful for what another human brings to the room.