There's a ghostwriter in my machine. And it's no Lee Israel— she'd balk at all the fast-flying verbal inanities. I speak of Smart Reply, Google's answer, in the form of a triad of autogene-rated responses, to the problem of email. Just the other day, it saw fit to butt-reply to a fren-emy of mine, "I'll be there!" This in response to an invitation I had planned to ignore. Not only do I now have to attend; I must be excited! about! it! Call me a jaded, post-privacy millennial, but I never cared that Google mined our missives for $$$. It's always been Google's internet; we'rejust living in it. But dragnetting my epistolary efforts to approximate my verbal style at its most insipid? "No thanks!" Language is codable, duh—Claude Shannon said that forever ago. Doesn't mean I want probabilistic Bayesian optimizations commandeering my inbox, my last bastion for unprocessed human communication. Al has its uses, of course. Curing cancer. ("Love it!") Generating knockoff Gauguins. ("So cute!") These are honest applications that don't try to hide the shortcomings of dumb pattern-matching. But Google's attempt at linguistic outsourcing, a multiple-choice tool to expedite the much-feted art of "inbox slaying"—that's a real horror. Once we embrace the personalized simulacrum, we start letting Al speak for us. Soon we let it speak as us. It's ... almost soothing. Frees up time. I'm nearing inbox zero! Ah, Grandma just checked in. She's not feeling well. I'll select "Oh no!" Yes. She'll care that I care. And she'll reply, so kindly, so expediently: "Thanks so much!"
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