STOP USING AI TO WRITE YOUR SH*T

I'll be blunt: y'all already suck at communication. Why would you make it harder on yourself?

As someone who has literally built my career on teaching people how to communicate in healthy, pro-social ways, I promise you cannot afford to atrophy those muscles any further.

Most people are coming into adulthood with the bare fucking minimum skillset for building relationship because none of us learned in our families of origin how to do it. Because most of us were raised by unhealed people who likewise had no skills.

This lack of skills around healthy communication, nonviolent conflict + repair, and the most basic vulnerability required for intimacy has already set us up to have difficulties.

Overcoming our deficits in these areas requires endless practice; you have to be flexing these muscles constantly in order to build dexterity and confidence.

Because all of this is 100% true and factual, I will hold your hand why I say the following:

Using ChatGPT or other AI tool to craft your emails and even TEXT MESSAGES is an absolutely terrible idea.

What the entire fuck are you thinking? Relying on AI to tell you whether your message is passive-aggressive or not does not equip you to discern for yourself and reframe for yourself in real time.

Or being like "here is what I want to say, make it nice" doesn't actually TEACH you the skills to clarify your message for maximum digestibility (or kindness).

You can't consult with ChatGPT -- and btw Sam Altman is a HORRIBLE PERSON and you should cancel it anyway for that alone-- for every written correspondence and create the false sense that you actually are a decent communicator and then be surprised to find yourself in a conversation and bumble around like the conflict averse baby chicken that you are.

You can't expect people to take you seriously in writing if you can't actually say words IRL.

For ACTUAL REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS to go more smoothly, you have to be practicing your skills all the time. Giving a prompt to AI is NOT practicing your skills.

I can't believe I have to say this, but WRITE YOUR OWN GODDAMNED EMAILS before your brain forgets how to do that. Compose your own online dating profile with your own words so that you are authentically reflected.

When you text your partner something you're struggling with, and it's clumsy but you get it out and it's clear, be proud of yourself, and discuss with them how hard it was for you but how you're committed to learning how to communicate effectively with them.

I swear to god if I hear another person say "I'll just have ChatGPT do it" my head will explode.

Outsourcing hard things like "learning how to effectively communicate" to AI is not the same as outsourcing formatting for a document or creating a streamlined process to make your business run more smoothly.

AI is a nightmare in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons, but I can see the value. And even if I couldn't, it clearly does not make people stop using it to know it's ruining the earth (via data centers' obscene freshwater consumption) or taking everyone's jobs (rendering millions of people irrelevant in the workforce, which makes life in capitalism that much harder for them...). I hope I can at least convince a few people to bypass the instinct to outsource their basic human communication.

Because you have to learn to communicate in a healthy way in your closest relationships IN REAL TIME (if you want to have healthy connections with other humans) and there's no prompt, shortcut, or app to help with that.

It's a skill you have to PRACTICE by using your ACTUAL HUMAN BRAIN. Which has endless capacity and creativity; you just have to be willing to put in the work to get better at it.

TL;DR: Fuck AI, use your own words for the love of god

PS I wrote this in 12 minutes and did not check with AI to tell me if it was good because I trust my skills.

PPS I am not talking about people who actually CANNOT do something and need tools to assist. I am talking about regular-ass people who are too scared (and frankly, too lazy sometimes) to do hard things like learn how to communicate.