--- > I imagine that you, like many people, have for years sent greeting cards that leverage the words of a professional writer to articulate what are allegedly your own thoughts and emotions. This practice, of course, was not without controversy and critics. Hallmark's very first slogan, introduced in 1944, was “When you care enough to send the very best,” a linguistic sleight of hand that inverted the most common critique of commercial greeting cards—that relying on the words of professionals was, in fact, evidence that you did not care enough to speak from your heart. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h48gf8wjk67ejxze6qy8g45r) --- > Such products have long approached what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “commodity frontier”—the threshold of activities we deem “too personal to pay for.” - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h48gg4rbe5wbtxzbvqwxr5wv) --- > Writing a wedding speech would seem to require similar emotional engagement. But perhaps you have reasoned that intent and selection—“It's the thought!”—are what matters in these situations. You are, after all, the one providing the model with the essential, albeit rough, emotive ingredients to produce the finished product. In conversations about AI-generated text, the prompt is often spoken of as the *logos*, the spiritual breath of human authenticity that animates the synthetic output (dismissed as so much mechanical “wordage”) with life and meaning. Just as the computer was, for Steve Jobs, a “bicycle for the mind,” so language-generation tools might be regarded as the vehicle that transports the spirit of our emotions from their point of origin to a desired destination. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h48gsvc4evk55nnq1r3ptjd3) --- > It's possible that expression, including linguistic expression, is not a mere afterthought in our emotional lives, but the whole point. If that's true, then the decision to outsource your speechwriting might contribute to a kind of emotional atrophy, a gradual loss of the ability to truly inhabit your internal states—or modulate them. A podcaster recently boasted that a friend of his who struggles with anger management uses AI “tone filters” when communicating with people who provoke his temper, feeding rageful rants into ChatGPT and asking the model to rewrite them “in a nicer way.” - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h48gvh8ydyvtrgsnxwqv4svt) --- > In the end, it's the effort we put into a task that determines its subjective significance. If you decide to hand over the speechwriting work to a machine, then you are essentially confirming that it is meaningless boilerplate. If, on the other hand, you decide to write the toast yourself, you will undoubtedly come to see this work—and the end product—as important, if only because your actions have reinforced your belief that it is worthy of your time and attention. Maybe the speech won't achieve a toast-masterish polish or a Hallmark card's concision, but your words may lead you to your own emotions, which, for the time being, we aren't so eager to automate. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h48gy131sp44mkz3bk01qa1s) ---