Summary

Charity Majors documents her evolving—and contradictory—relationship with AI-generated text: publicly insisting outcomes are all that matter while privately developing a visceral rage toward 'slop' in her inbox. She resolves the contradiction by proposing a personal-vs-functional communication framework: AI is fine in functional contexts (code, artifacts, shared docs) but corrodes trust in personal or relational contexts, where the value of communication is that a specific human thought or felt something. The post concludes that companies need explicit norms for AI communication because old defaults no longer apply and the breach is filling with hurt feelings.

Key Insight

AI erodes trust not because of how much it is used, but because it is used in contexts where the value of communication is precisely that a specific human cared enough to think and write something themselves.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 8

  If they don't care enough about their own point of view to do the work and refine it themselves, if they don't care enough about me to write me a note, then why the fuck should I give them a single morsel of my precious attention?

• 5

  Every job language does for us is either functional or relational, or some combination of the two, and knowing which one you're in the middle of tells you a lot about whether AI belongs there, and how it's likely to be received.

• 7

  Relationship maintenance cannot be automated.

• 8

  AI is not magic. AI is just a tool… But it is special in one way: the slick, sycophantic, uncanny valleyness of the way it communicates. Human-like, but not human, which is somehow vastly more alienating than messages that are plainly automated.

• 8

  People always say, 'oh, but those were MY ideas, I was only getting AI to help me format them'. In my experience, people vastly overestimate how much comes from them and underestimate how much comes from the AI.

Tone

confessional, critical, passionate