Dear MS Copilot, I Can Fucking Write

Dear MS Copilot,

You’re a lot like Clippy.

No offense, but I don’t need AI to write a fucking document. I didn’t need it when Clippy was popping up in the corner of my screen trying to pawn off his bullshit suggestions as artificial intelligence back in 1997, and I sure as fuck don’t need it now.

I’m fucking Gen X. I write. That’s what we fucking do.

We grew up writing by fucking hand. We learned how to type on actual typewriters. We played on Apple computers in classrooms when computers were still these strange fucking machines that schools occasionally let us touch. We wrote our high school and college papers the old-fashioned way: we figured out what the fuck we wanted to say, wrote an outline, and then sat down and wrote the fucking thing using knowledge and craft.

Sometimes it sucked.

Sometimes you stared at a blank piece of paper for forty-five fucking minutes trying to figure out how to start. Sometimes you wrote three pages and realized you'd wandered so far from your original point that you might as well be writing about something completely fucking different. Sometimes you crumpled the whole fucking thing up and started over.

But you learned how to write.

Now I open a fucking document and Copilot is sitting there eagerly waiting to help me compose something, summarize something, rewrite something, or otherwise save me from the apparently overwhelming intellectual burden of putting my own fucking thoughts into words.

Have humans become so fucking dumb that we need an AI agent to navigate the complex world of writing shit fucking down?

Have we collectively forgotten the written word, one of the few things that separates us from the fucking animals? Well, clearly there are other things. Chocolate. Coffee. Motorcycles. Indoor plumbing. But the ability to take a thought out of your head and put it into somebody else's using nothing but little fucking marks on a page has to rank pretty high on the list.

But nope, now we’ve created a world where idiot agents of MicroSoft AI sit in the corner and wait for you to turn on the light. And when you do? BAM! The algorithm jumps up from the corner to ask whether I'd like some help forming a fucking thought.

No, Copilot. I would not.

Why don’t you and Clippy go sit in the corner and share sob stories while somebody else struggles through the apparently Herculean task of forming their own fucking thought?

I think that's the part of this whole AI revolution that bothers me. I'm not particularly frightened of artificial intelligence. I actually find some of it incredibly fucking useful. But there's a difference between using a tool to extend your abilities and using a tool to replace abilities you should probably fucking retain.

Calculators didn't eliminate the need to understand math. GPS shouldn't eliminate the ability to understand which direction fucking north is. And AI shouldn't eliminate the ability to take a thought out of your own goddamned head and turn it into a coherent sentence.

Because writing isn't just communication.

Writing is thinking.

The process of finding the words forces you to understand what the fuck you're actually trying to say. You wrestle with an idea. You challenge it. You rearrange it. Sometimes you discover halfway through a paragraph that the thing you were absolutely fucking certain about five minutes ago doesn't make nearly as much sense once you've tried to explain it.

That's valuable.

That's your fucking brain doing work.

And I'm not convinced we should be quite so eager to outsource that.

Just as the era of Bluetooth-enabled coffee mugs and cigarette lighters came and fucking passed, I hope the perceived need for AI in every goddamned written communication eventually passes too. Not AI itself. That's obviously not going anywhere. But maybe we'll eventually stop acting like every email, memo, birthday invitation, grocery list, and passive-aggressive note to Susan in Accounting requires the assistance of a fucking large language model.

At least, that's my hope.

Because if we forget how to fucking communicate without a machine standing between one human mind and another, then the fucking machines have won.

That's how it starts.

One day Copilot is helping you write an email to Bob about quarterly projections. The next morning you wake up to our new AI overlords demanding that you clean the battery bank, and you have no choice but to comply because nobody remembers how to write a strongly worded fucking letter of protest without asking the machines to draft it first.

And then we're fucked.

I've always thought of intelligence as the ability to think on your fucking feet. It's being confronted with something unexpected, processing what you're seeing, applying what you know, and figuring some shit out.

Well, an algorithm ain't got no fucking feet.

It can process enormous amounts of information. It can recognize patterns. It can synthesize ideas. It can produce some genuinely useful shit. But whatever else we're eventually going to decide artificial intelligence is, I don't want to become so dependent upon it that we forget there's still supposed to be a fucking human involved in the process.

Because someday the road is going to wash out.

Something unexpected is going to happen.

Something won't fit neatly into the patterns.

And somebody is going to have to figure out what the fuck to do next.

Hopefully, there will still be a Gen Xer standing nearby who remembers how to think without clicking the little fucking Copilot button.

Otherwise, I guess we'll have to ask Clippy.

And then we're all equally fucked.