Writing with artificial intelligence: is the voice still ours?
It’s almost half past eleven. After an argument, you want to write a message to say sorry. You’ve started three: one too cold, one too long, one that sounded like an excuse. So you open an app and type: “Help me apologise sincerely, without sounding syrupy.”
A few seconds later the text is there. It is balanced, warm, even beautiful. Your finger hovers over “send”.
Do those words really say what you feel? Or do they express something that sounds good, but that you haven’t yet made your own?
The question concerns artificial intelligence, but it touches an older one: what makes the words we address to others our own?
An old kind of help
Asking for help to find the words is nothing new. People who could not write could turn to a public scribe. We buy greeting cards with ready-printed phrases. We ask a friend to read over an important letter.
A card bought at the stationer’s doesn’t necessarily make the affection of the person who signs it false. And someone who struggles to express themselves can find, with some help, a way of saying something they feel deeply.
The problem, then, is to understand what we hand over to the tool. The shape of a thought we recognise? Or also the task of understanding what we think?
Cyrano beneath the balcony
In Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, first performed in 1897, Cyrano lends his own words to Christian, a handsome and awkward young man. Both love Roxane, but she believes that the letters, and the words she hears beneath the balcony, come from Christian. Many years later, hearing Cyrano read a letter, she recognises the voice and understands the deception.
The story raises a question: who are we falling in love with when the words that reach us belong to someone other than the person who signs them?
The comparison with AI has its limits, though. Cyrano is a person involved in that relationship. We can tell a system about an argument and ask it for a suitable text, but the experience of that argument and the responsibility for what we will say remain ours.
A convincing sentence can describe a feeling well. That doesn’t mean the person who sends it has really recognised that feeling, or is willing to act on it.
Writing and memory
In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the myth of Theuth and Thamus. Theuth presents writing as an aid to memory and wisdom. Thamus fears instead that, by relying on written signs, people will exercise their memory less and mistake the appearance of knowledge for knowledge itself.
Plato entrusts this reflection to a written text. It is an interesting tension: we can question the limits of a tool and, at the same time, use it.
The myth doesn’t prove that AI makes us less able to think. It does invite us, however, to notice what we go on exercising when we let ourselves be helped.
While we search for the words to apologise, we sometimes discover what we are really sorry for. Working out whether we hurt someone, defended our pride or avoided a truth takes work that a well-written message can accompany, but cannot do in our place.
Three messages, three weights
Not every text asks the same thing of us.
In a love note, the time and attention given to the words can be part of the gift. But sincerity isn’t measured by how hard something was to write. Even an assisted text can be authentic, if it tells of something recognisable: a shared memory, a gesture, a detail that matters to both of you.
In an apology, the decisive point is what we are willing to acknowledge and to change. A flawless formula is not enough. If we write “I understand” or promise not to repeat a behaviour, those words commit us, even when the first draft was produced by a machine.
In professional communication, help can serve to put ideas in order and make them clearer. Here too, though, a responsibility remains: the information must be true, and the skills described must be ours. The quality of the form cannot cover what is missing in the substance.
One question can guide us: if the other person asked me what I mean by these words, could I answer without going back to the tool for help?
The signature
A voice can be ours even when we haven’t invented every sentence. It becomes ours when we recognise what it says and are willing to answer for it.
Before sending a message, we can stop at one precise passage: “Can I keep this promise? Does this sentence describe what I feel? Is there anything I’ve left in because it sounds good, even though I don’t think it?”
It is in this rereading that help can become personal expression. We correct, we cut, we add a detail, we give up an elegant sentence that doesn’t belong to us.
At the end of Rostand’s story, Roxane recognises a voice she had already heard in the dark. That voice belongs to someone who, until then, had stayed hidden.
A message, too, can leave us in the shadows, if we send it to avoid a conversation. Or it can help us begin one.
Perhaps a voice is ours when, after pressing “send”, we are willing to stay present: to listen to a reply, to explain, to correct ourselves, to keep what we have promised.
Words can be helped. The relationship still asks for us.
References
- Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), especially Acts III and V. Original French text.
- Plato, Phaedrus, 274c–275b, the myth of Theuth and Thamus. English translation by Benjamin Jowett.
Your experience
If you received a sincere apology, but one written with the help of artificial intelligence, would it change anything for you? What would matter most? Write it in the comments, even in just a few lines.
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