Why We Shouldn't Ask AI to Write Our Letters

Last night while I watched Simone Biles roll out her calf injury at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a commercial for Google’s Gemini came on. Narrated by a proud father who is a former runner, the commercial features stills of his daughter running and training and searching hurdling techniques on Google. 

He’s delighted his daughter loves running and sees Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levore as a role model. Then the narration swerves a bit: “She wants to show Sydney some love and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right. So, Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.” 

Adorable. 

And it made me want to throw up. 

If you don’t know, Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot designed to help humans do things that humans once got great joy out of doing - generating literature and art and movies and writing letters to our heroes. In addition to perpetuating the tired old chestnut that writing must be “just right” to be effective, the commercial also negates the real relationship at the heart of this exchange - a father and his daughter and the opportunity to bond over composing a letter to a celebrity athlete. 

Sometime in the late 90s, I saw a similar commercial for Google itself. A grandfather and his granddaughter walking in the woods bird watching.The granddaughter wants to know more information about a bird they see, and the grandfather can’t deliver. The gist:  you don’t need Grandpa and his faulty memory any more. Just Google it. 

Let me say I’m a big fan of Google. It’s efficient and intuitive. I love the clean interface and its streamline toolbar.  I’ve used it as a learning management system as a teacher and have written three books with it. I track my daylily inventory with its sheets and gather data with its forms. However, its newest tool leaves me not only cold, but chilled to the bone, despite the 90-plus temps outside. 

One of the reasons I’m a writer is that I was given opportunities to write - to get my thoughts out of my head and onto the page, to fail at that, of course, but to gamely revise again and again until the letter delivered my aims.  My mother was a stickler for thank you notes written within a week of any gift. Both my grandmothers wrote me letters when I was little, and I wrote them back. These two wonderful women are gone, but I still have those letters. I have them because my mother, who valued education and the written word, kept them for me until I could keep them for myself. Those letters are a treasure map of my burgeoning personality, my quirks, my voice, my wobbly scrawls and my interests throughout my adolescence. 

In elementary school, our teachers invited us to write letters to Santa in December and to our mothers in May. We wrote letters to our governor and our president.  In 1976 as we celebrated the Bicentennial, I remember writing thank you letters to a Founding Father we saw as inspirational. In short, I wrote a lot of letters. 

And with every letter I wrote, my identity - as a thinker, as a communicator, as a processor of ideas and images - solidified and grew stronger and more resilient, more inviolable. By the time I got to middle school, I was writing essays and poetry and short stories, but it was those letters that served as the welcome mat into the house of my own mind. I learned to respect and lean into my own efforts. 

A letter is a perfect writing opportunity for a budding writer because it has all the necessary elements that make writing powerful - a need to communicate with an audience, typically a single person, with whom you have (or want to have) some kind of relationship. A letter to a hero is an especially potent invitation to write because you want to express and impress, you want to tell them exactly how they’ve inspired you, and exactly how much you admire them. A fan letter is your personality in microcosm. 

That we are giving up these opportunities to be fully human — to be in connection with other humans through our puny, wobbly efforts — is abominable. 

As a writing teacher and a writer, I understand AI is just a tool, and it can, as typewriters and computers once did, assist writers with getting started and getting organized. Yet, I can’t help but recall Wendell Berry’s 1988 essay, “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer.“ He writes, “....when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante's, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.” 

Clearly I am not as tech-adverse as Berry, but the letter commercial rattled me with its siren song of ease and perfection. Writing is hard, which is why it matters, which is why we must practice it, which is why we must do it for ourselves. But it is not the writing we are outsourcing to the machines - it’s our hearts, our beating, yearning, thinking hearts. And that is what writing ultimately is - our hearts and minds on the page.