Simplified Speech #244 – Using AI for personal messages

Hello and welcome to Simplified Speech, the QLIPS series which features clear, natural, and easy to understand English conversations between native speakers. Joining me now to co-host this episode is Indiana. Hello, Indiana. Hey Andrew. What's up? Not too much. How are you doing? Pretty good. It's gonna be a busy week, but I'm here with you to end my my Monday. We're recording on a Monday and we have such an interesting topic to talk about. So I'm super hyped to have this conversation.

Yeah, so today everyone, we are going to talk about using AI to help you write personal messages. And Indiana, you were the brainchild behind this episode. So why don't I let you introduce it? Okay. So I teach English. I'm a tutor or an English teacher to students online and for my intermediate or advanced students. One of the things that I love to do is try to find an interesting article or YouTube video to discuss in our lessons.

And sometimes it's like really hard to find uh good material, like really interesting, engaging material to have a whole discussion about. Um, but this article that I found was super interesting. I found this article in The Guardian that basically was discussing Is it okay? to use AI like Chat GPT, large language model services. Is it okay to use AI for personal messages? Like for example, if your friend's mom or dad passed away.

And you did not know like how to express like, I'm sorry for your loss, you know, I'm there if you need me. and you really wanted to say the right thing, but you didn't know how to say it, is it okay uh as a friend, as some as someone in their life, is it okay for you to go to Chat GPT, for example, and say, hey, can you help me write this?

So it's just this big question of like what is the boundary, what are the lines with with this? And I was like, wow and all of the students that I've discussed it with were very interested and had very strong opinions about this.

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to get into our conversation today and discuss this in more detail. And I'm looking forward to it as well. I think this is a really timely topic and something that a lot of people are thinking about and using these days is AI to help them write. So We'll get started with the conversation in just a moment.

But before we do, everyone, I want to let you know about the helpful study guide that is available to accompany this episode. So in the study guide, you are going to find an interactive transcript. You're going to find detailed vocabulary explanations and examples of the key vocabulary that you'll hear me and here Indiana use in our conversation. You're also going to find a comprehension quiz, an expression quiz, and questions that you can use for speaking and writing practice.

And those are all of the good things that are in the study guide, but you'll also get to come to our speaking classes for this episode as well. We're gonna have three live speaking classes where we can discuss this lesson together. with other CLOOPs members and our awesome teachers. But to get the study guide and to join the speaking classes, you do need to be a CLOOPS member.

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And Indiana with that announcement out of the way, why don't we get started with this episode? So just a moment ago, you mentioned that you read uh an article from the Guardian newspaper about this topic of using AI to help you write personal messages. And we'll link that episode in the description, everyone, but I also wanted just to read you a short summary of the article so that we all have the same background knowledge going into our conversation. So Indiana will

Discuss this article together in just a moment, but first I'm gonna read the summary here for everyone. So guys, the article is called Hey man, I'm so sorry for your loss. Should you use AI to text? And the writer is named Adrian Matai. And Adrian Mattai in this article explores this new AI trend, which is people using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. Yeah, I think those are the popular ones.

For writing assistance, right? For writing emails or school assignments. However, The article really focuses in on the fact that people are now using AI to write personal messages as well. So things like birthday cards, text messages to friends, uh messages.

saying I'm sorry for your loss, like these condolence messages that we send to people after a loved one has passed away, or even wedding vows. So In the article, the author looks at both sides of the debate, and on one hand, some people think AI is a fantastic communication tool The article features an interview with an etiquette expert, somebody who is an expert about behavior and following the rules, right, and good manners. That is what we call etiquette.

So this etiquette expert says that AI can be really helpful to people who struggle to find the right words and it can make your message sound more polite, more caring, and it can save a lot of time. And the etiquette expert argues that using AI shows that you care enough to want your message to sound perfect. So there's good intention behind using AI. So it's okay to use it, but on the other hand

Some psychologists and just many people in general feel that using AI to write a personal message is lazy and dishonest. And they argue that the effort it takes to write a message even if it's messy or has some mistakes, is exactly what makes it human and meaningful. The writer in the article even shares a story about two close friends who stopped talking to each other because one of them started using AI to write her text messages.

So the friend who was receiving the AI texts felt betrayed and she didn't want to be friends anymore because she said it felt like she was talking to a machine instead of a real human being. So at the end of the day, this article leaves us with a very big question, and that's what we're gonna discuss now in Diana. And that question is. Is the convenience of AI worth losing the human touch in our relationship?

Or does it make us lose the human touch in our relationships? I guess it depends on your perspective.

And why don't we transition into our conversation now? And I guess maybe a good place to start, Indiana, is just to ask you if you've ever used these AI writing assistance tools like ChatGPT. to help you write in your life, maybe an email or a message to a friend or I don't know, uh an article summary. Have you used them before?

So for work, I suppose occasionally I I would use one of these AI tools to maybe summarize an article or a video that I needed a refresher on or One really fun thing that I I like to use them for with this that makes life a little bit easier is like, hey, identify ten key intermediate level vocabulary words For an English learner

uh from this article and then I can double check and say, oh yeah, this is a really great one just to speed up a process of like picking uh materials for a lesson, right? It can help streamline like making a lesson plan, right? So I I do use it for some very basic draft writing like that.

But honestly, I've never used it for emails or and especially not something like this, like a text or like if I have something important to say to somebody, like a letter or an email or a text to somebody in my life. I have never used it for that because I feel like that crosses a line. for that communication. Like it's no longer coming from from me, right? Even if I workshop it, like the the core of it is coming from from something else. And that just feels like

kind of a a step too far for me personally. How do you how do you feel about this? Have you done this actually and and used uh an AI tool to help like workshop or or write a text to somebody in your life? Yeah, first of all, I should explain that expression to workshop. That's an interesting one and one that maybe our listeners are not familiar with. So to workshop something means to rehearse and try out something before you perform it. That is to workshop. So

Yeah, for me in my life, I use AI all the time. Every day. It's become really an important integrated part of my workflow. But I I gotta agree with you, Indiana. I don't use it too much in my personal life. One thing that I do do these days is uh I I find that I'm using my computer. as something that I talk to more than I type to these days because the voice recognition features on computers are really great. And so I can just

speak to the computer and it will write down everything that I say. However, sometimes I need that to be cleaned up a little bit. Sometimes the sentences are like run-on sentences and the punctuation isn't so great. So when I'm just brainstorming or I'm coming up with ideas I'll often just talk to the computer instead of sitting there writing to the computer. And then I'll get AI to clean up my brainstorming and maybe organize it in point form or note form.

So I find that I use it often for for brainstorming, for planning, for coming up with ideas. And then I can even take my brainstorming and ask the AI to give me some new insights or maybe some new suggestions. So I use it a lot like this all the time, every day. However, I don't really use it for writing personal messages and I feel like that crosses a line or crosses a boundary. Like it just feels so fake to me. Like there's no

good intention behind it. It's like I I care so little about you that I'm gonna use AI to write this message instead of taking the two seconds and the little bit of brain power that I need to use to to come up with an idea myself. However, that being said, I will say that when I have to text message uh my wife's family, like from time to time, I'll I'll text with my mother-in-law or my father-in-law or my brother-in-law, my wife's side of the family. I always write the message first.

in Korean, because I always text with them in Korean. However, because I'm not a native speaker in Korean and I'm always a little bit worried about uh making grammar mistakes or grammar errors or typos. Then often I will ask the AI to give me some feedback on the message. I don't ask it to write it for me. I'm always very, you know, I want to learn. I want to improve.

So I ask it to the you know, if there was a mistake in this message, could you point out one or two things that are unnatural and then I'll try again and try to improve the message that way. So I do use AI sometimes with my personal messages when I'm writing in Korean, especially to my wife's family. Not so much with my friends, because I don't care if I make grammar mistakes with them as much, but with my

family when I wanna be more polite and make sure I'm not, you know, doing something incorrect. I will use uh AI in that way. And they're awesome tools, right? But yeah, just You know, if I were to write the message in English and then just be translate this to Korean and then send it Or, I don't know, write like it's my brother-in-law's birthday, write a birthday note and then translate to Korean and send it. That would be so superficial, so artificial. So I don't want to do that.

Yeah, it sounds like your main criticism, if I understand your perspective right, is that if you just Throw a prompt into AI. to produce a message for somebody in your life. It's like you're not even giving them the time time of day, which means you do not really have any interest in them or care about them, like, oh, messaging somebody in my life. is such a chore.

is so not that important to me that I can just have my AI assistant do it for me. Which is exactly how I feel about this, uh, if I'm not putting words in your mouth here. I think that's what what you think is the main problem here, right? It's like showing that lack of caring about somebody. Yeah, you summarized it perfectly and I think this is interesting, right? Because there are two different situations where I could see someone using AI to help them express a personal message.

The first situation is like we just talked about, where the person is really being lazy and they just don't care. They just want to write the birthday message or they just want to write whatever message it is. as quick as possible and they don't want to invest any emotional like time into preparing that message at all. So they just say it's a chat GPT, write me a birthday message to my best friend or something, right? To me that

is really not so good. And if my friends were using Chat GPT to send me birthday messages that I knew were prepared like that, I'd feel let down. I'd feel disappointed. Like my friend just doesn't care for me at all. Like they they can't even take two minutes to

come up with like a personal note for me. They're just using ChatGPT. I would feel let down and disappointed in my friends if they were doing that. So that's the first group of people. The second group of people, I think, are maybe people who Want to express? emotion who want to be caring, but they just don't know how to do it. Like maybe they're not in touch.

with their emotions or they lack the words, they don't know what to say. And so they actually really struggle with putting their emotions into words. And I think for that group of people, maybe GPT could be actually a good tool to use. Like it could help them put some words to the emotions that they don't know how to express.

It's tough. I think it's it's situation by situation. I think sometimes like I I know I've had in my life when uh a friend or somebody will tell me that you know, one of their parents has passed away or a friend tells me about one of their parents who has like a life threatening illness or something. In those kinds of situations, I obviously feel really bad, but me too, I don't know how to respond right away. It's something that I've never had to encounter in my own life.

It's something that I haven't encountered too many times in my friends' lives as well. So I don't have a lot of experience with that. And I have to really think about like, huh, how can I respond to this situation? And what do I have to say? What is the right thing to say? It's not so clear. Now, I don't know if jumping to GPT and asking it right away is the best thing to do, but I know sometimes in my life too, I've had these situations where I feel bad.

But I don't know how to express that exactly in words. So I have to think about it and maybe write some drafts before I can respond to that situation. So I can see it from that perspective as well. Yeah. And you know, I do agree, like I have a little more sympathy with the second group of people you've described where they really want to write something and express those feelings, but they struggle with writing or putting their emotions into words.

Um but I worry that using AI tools like this for that could become a crutch or a slippery slope into just never like becoming lazy with it and never really developing those skills, which this person could really benefit from developing. So I although I feel more sympathy for this group of people and I agree that there's definitely lots of people out there using i the AI for these reasons to write these personal messages.

It's a little worrisome in that perspective. And then another thing, which is not available to everyone, right? Because a lot of people don't have many close personal relationships in their lives or people that they can turn to for advice. But what I would love to see instead of somebody turning to GPT for, you know, okay, how can I say this to my friend and not offend them? How can I say that I'm there for them in a in a heartfelt way?

You know, would be instead of going to the AI tool for that. Going to somebody in your life, right? Like your friend, you know, hey, my friend is going through this and I want to say this. Does this sound okay to you? What do you think is a good way to say this? Have you experienced this?

Anything where you can like turn to another person and foster that human connection and try to get that that perspective from a person, especially if they know the person who's going through the tough time and they can have that context. to help color their response to you and you can you can help underst be helped to understand further what what they might be going through. How could you say this right?

Basically, all that is to say, yeah, if you can turn to another person for this like soundboarding, for this workshopping instead of GPT, that would be so much better in my eyes.

Yeah, definitely I think that would be a good way to grow emotionally. It's like I don't know how to express myself, but I'll get some help from a friend and workshop it with them, right? Get some feedback from them. That's a great idea. I also Share your concern that if we're just using GPT to do the hard emotional work for us, to put our emotions into words and so that we can just go, oh, that sounds good, and then copy and paste.

There's this expression that we use sometimes in these situations. It's do the work, right? Do the work. when we're talking about emotions and feelings, sometimes we have to d do the work. We have to sit with those emotions. We have to think about them. We have to try to express them. Which doesn't come easy and naturally for some people. I'm one of those people. It doesn't really naturally come easy.

And so I think about even when I was writing my wedding vows, like it took me maybe six weeks or even longer to write my wedding vows. It's something that I had to write and draft and think about and do again and again. And it was something that to be honest with you, I was a little nervous about and something that I kind of dreaded it's like how can I put I obviously love my wife and I wanna express this to her.

But being so vulnerable and and really sitting in those emotions and trying to take that emotion that's inside of me and put it into words and then have to share that publicly was something that was difficult for me to do. And so I gave it a long time and I wrote draft after draft and tweaked it and changed it until I felt like it has expressed what I wanted to express. And I'm so glad that there wasn't GPT at that time when I got married.

Because it would have been tempting. It would have been very tempting. But I'm glad that I went through that process and I did the work. I sat with my emotions. I really reflected on them. And I took that, you know, six weeks to to two months probably. to prepare them. And I think I did a good job in the end. We'd have to ask my wife, but I think she sa would say that I did a good job.

So yeah, I I agree that maybe these tools could be crutches and just by using them we're stunting ourselves and stunting here means to to stop to stop ourselves from some important emotional growth in our lives for these things that we have to go through. Absolutely. Yeah, I you mentioned these wedding vows. Like I think the article mentions that maybe from some discussion of people on Reddit, like how are you using AI? A lot of people have admitted to using it.

for what something as important I think is important as wedding vows. Um, and I think that would just be like such a betrayal if I found out that my spouse totally depended on AI for for, you know, their wedding vows. I don't think I could accept that at all. I think I would be so hurt.

What about you? I mean, clearly you put so much effort into yours. I think you would you would expect something similar or like yeah, that that truthful writing, that honest writing from from your wife. What would how would you feel if she wrote her wedding vows, uh, with the help of AI. Definitely be a red flag, right? It would show me that this person didn't do the work. They didn't put in the time or the care to sit with their emotions and to express them

in a heartfelt way. Or she didn't care enough. Or she doesn't have any good emotions or or loving feelings towards me. So it would definitely be a red flag. And maybe Cublips listeners don't know this the way that we know this, Indiana, as native speakers. But there are some characteristics, some telltale signs.

that uh a piece of writing has been written by AI. So there are some words that it uses again and again and again. There are some sentence structures and some punctuation that it uses again and again and again.

And so guys, as English learners, you have to be really careful about this as well. I think it can be harder for English learners to notice these kinds of things, but To me, I think these days it is very, very easy for me to notice when something has been written by AI, just because there are the same sentence structures that it uses. And I can even tell, oh, this one was written by Claude, this one was written by ChatGPT, because each tool

has uh a different set of vocabulary that it uses again and again or a different sentence structure that it uses again and again. So you might think that, oh, nobody's gonna tell, but people who spend a lot of time on the internet Like me, we can tell and we can notice. So yeah, if my wife You know, when we were getting married, if she was trying to pull a fast one on me and just use Chat Chapiti, and I noticed those Chat Chapiti sentence structures and vocabulary in her wedding vows,

I would feel very betrayed and like she didn't really love me at all. So Yeah, I think you have to be very, very careful about this. Now, if it was just like an email, a quick email or a quick text message. Yeah, whatever. E everybody goes through some busy times in their lives and if it's not, you know, really important and you just use

uh ChatGPT to write a quick message. Okay, fine, whatever. That doesn't matter. But for something that has serious emotional weight like a wedding vow or a best man speech. or even uh maybe a s a talk or a speech at a funeral, something like that. I really wouldn't want somebody using an AI tool in those situations. I agree. Totally.

And actually, you know, I I'm I'm thinking like w how would somebody push back on this, right? Uh this article as you as you described earlier in your summary.

showed some people talking about the positives of these tools, right? Creating a beautiful, touching final product. And you've just mentioned, right, because we can tell You know, oh, because of this sentence structure, because of this punctuation, because of the style of the writing, we're pretty confident that something is AI or not AI, right?

But if if somebody doesn't have that instinct or that isn't isn't terminally online as as uh you and I might be, um, and this is just a fun expression to say constantly online, so If the product is so beautiful and so touching and the person receiving this message does not realize that it's AI. Like, does it matter how the sausage was made?

yet another expression here, which just means the exact process, what the details are, what the process was in to creating something. Like, does it really matter how the sausage is made? This is maybe a devil's advocate question for this. Uh for for this. Like I know that you and I probably think, yeah, it does matter how the sausage is made, but uh what what do you say, Andrew? Like what would you say if somebody pushed back on you with this with this uh argument?

We're throwing a lot of idiomatic expressions out there right now. Sorry everyone. But we have this other saying in English, ignorance is bliss, right? So if you don't know that it was written by AI then maybe it doesn't matter. Does it really matter?

I mean, I think it's case by case, situation by situation. I keep going back to like just thinking about somebody using AI to write a wedding vow. Just seems like If you can't sit down and try to express your emotions, then you probably shouldn't be getting married. So like even if I didn't notice it, I think just like taking that step to use it as a tool to help you express yourself. Maybe is like a sign of immaturity or something that you need to work on. I'm not sure. So

Not even not even as the receiver, just as the writer itself. Maybe we have to think like if we can't express ourselves. then there's something that we need to do. Like it's a s a sign of a an insufficiency on our end. Either like an emotional immaturity or Something that we need to to work on in ourselves. So I'm thinking of it almost more from the writer's perspective. Like if I can't.

If I can't show my care, if I can't show my love, if I can't show my condolence, then what does that say about me as a person? Like I probably have to work on myself in order to be able to do that. I I guess that's what I'm concerned about mostly. How about you, Indiana? If you didn't notice, if you weren't able to tell at all that it was written by AI, would you care? Like, does it matter?

I do still think it matters because of the the weight of this writing. Like if we're going to this marriage vows, this wedding vows uh example again, it is just so important that for it to be fabricated or not coming from from your heart and just being written by a tool like

It's just even if it's beautiful to the other person, I think there is a betrayal there. And this also makes me think about like I think we've passed this moment in history and time where like and this is a small thing, but like, okay, five years ago, if I'm scrolling through social media and I see a cute animal video, like a dog and a cat interacting in a sweet way.

Like I'm just I see it and I enjoy it and I think, wow, like that's really nice. It's really sweet that there are animals out there that interact in this way. That brought me some joy. But today, I kind of like can't enjoy those kinds of videos anymore in the same way. I'm always a little bit suspicious because like.

Once in a while you see one, you're like, Okay, this is really obviously AI. But then that makes you think like, well, AI is just gonna get better and better and like Maybe I saw a video last week of a dog and a cat and it was actually AI and that like I had this feeling, this reaction to something that was completely not real and that, you know, this is getting a little more into the weeds of just like the other uses of AI.

and like the artistic value of AI, but uh I just feel so suspicious all the time. So I think on the principle This is not good. Even if we can't tell, like on the principle, it's it's it's not good'cause I I'm gonna always be suspicious about this. Yeah. I mean that's the world we're living in these days, is that we can't tell what is real, what is AI. Not just for text, but for music, for video, for pretty much anything that we see online these days. We always have to think.

that maybe it could be AI and like you said, it's just going to continue to get better and better and better. And how we deal with that as humans is a question mark where we don't really know what life is going to be like in the near future.

Indiana, we'll wrap up here in just a sec, but you and I have been on the same page, I think, for this entire episode, which is a little bit boring, but you said that Your students, when you discuss this article with them, they had very strong opinions. And I'm wondering, did any student

come up with a different opinion than the one that we have? What was some of the pushback that you heard from your students? Frankly, it was mostly Students having the same opinion as us very strongly reacting negatively against this kind of personal message AI use. But a few students, they started out being very generous towards it, like, well, there's a lot of great applications and if you're just using it to

proofread and find synonyms and like edit your writing, there's really no harm in that. But like as we talked about it and as we looked at the examples in the article, Like almost everybody kind of changed their mind by the end of the conversation when they when they thought about, I think, like, what if somebody wrote them a message? And like they couldn't even tell it was AI or, you know, they realized that it was completely not from the heart of the other person. Like

A lot of people changed their minds by the end of our conversation, which was very interesting. Like they started out with this charitable opinion and then, you know, moved more into our camp here of being pretty critical of this. So That was interesting. Hmm, okay. Well, very good. I'm wondering about our audience as well. Listeners, what do you think about this?

As a writer, do you think it's okay to use AI to assist you in writing these kinds of personal messages that can sometimes be very, very meaningful and very important in our lives? And what about as a reader, if you're receiving wedding vows or you're receiving uh a heartfelt birthday card from someone and you later learn that it was written by AI. How are you going to react to that?

We'd love to hear your opinion and what you have to say. And one of the best ways to do that is on our Discord community. The link to join is in the description for this episode. And we always have great conversations. after listening to one of our Clips episodes over on the Discord. So come on over and join the conversation and share your opinion. Indiana and I are definitely looking forward to what you have to say.

and we'll also be having some speaking classes about this episode as well. We're gonna gather with QLIPS members in a small group setting, and really get into the nitty-gritty and share our opinion with each other and talk about some of the topics that came up in this episode over in our speaking classes. So it's just a great way to hang out, to make some friends, and most importantly, to also improve your English speaking fluency.

So if you'd like to join those classes, you do have to be a QLOOPS member, but you can sign up for an affordable price on our website, QLIPS.com, and you can also see the schedule for the upcoming speaking classes there. So you can see if it will fit with your daily schedule. And yeah, we hope to see you soon in an upcoming speaking class.

All right. Well, I think we'll wrap things up here for today. Indiana, thank you for this great episode topic and for sharing this this article with us. We should also say we'll put the article link in the description as well. So if you guys want to read.

the full Guardian article. It it's there for you and it goes into a lot more detail. So it could be cool to read if you're interested in this topic. But yeah, thank you, Indiana. Absolutely. Looking forward to hearing all of our listeners' opinions on this one. Art Andrew Seuson. Yeah, thank you so much. See you everybody.