What Happens When AI Ghostwrites Your Valentine
Outsourcing your love may cost you more than you think.
When I was a young ghostwriter, one of my first gigs was to write an online dating profile (Tinder was still many years away) for a client. We worked together to build the profile that that sounded like him, because it all came from him: his words, his phraseology, his voice. Those qualities that we transmitted on paper were the direct result of several conversations about his likes and dislikes, of listening to him talk and learning about the kind of person he was and who he wanted to spend time with. True enough, I could have taken his CV and smoothed over the rough spots, highlighted the positives, and created a voice in print that would be approachable and confident, but if I did it without his input, this would have been nothing more than just another work for hire.
I enjoyed this assignment because the stakes were tangible; write a good profile, get a date. And, our words worked. My client not only found a girlfriend, less than a year later, they were married, and a few years after that, they had a child. That's about as happy an ending as you could ask for.
Did my ghostwriting client feel guilty about outsourcing his dating profile? I never got that sense from him, but a story in Fast Company about the guilt people feel when they use AI to craft a Valentine had me wondering. Similar to working with a human ghostwriter, but supercharged, AI ghostwriting gets Romeo a well-written and personalized note for his Juliet in seconds. But, it appears there's a psychological cost to outsourcing those love letters. A recent study found that the more someone outsources emotional and personal writing to a chatbot (think wedding vows, birthday greetings, and other such notes) the guiltier the writers feel because they're taking credit for words that didn't hail from real emotional work. Writers felt the same amount of guilt when they asked a fellow human to secretly write the letters, too.
The researchers concluded, somewhat obviously, that outsourcing an entire Valentine's Day message to AI loses its meaning for the sender, but the technology can be a serviceable brainstorming partner rather than a ghostwriter. "Co-creation, not complete delegation," they suggest.
My client got a polished profile that emerged from genuine self-disclosure and conversation. The best ghostwriting is a collaboration that forces writers to articulate their feelings, and the only way to really do that is to sit in that discomfort of figuring out what you want to say. That's the thing AI shortcuts.