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Is it dishonest to let an assistant answer your messages in your own voice?

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Business & technology ethicsAnalyticOrdinary language philosophyJ. L. Austin#ai-assistants#authorship#honesty#sincerity
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Its coordinates: 3.3.3 Business and Economic Ethics · 3.3.4 Ethics of Technology and AI

Many email and messaging apps now offer to draft your replies, and some promise to learn the way you write. So here is an everyday case.

Your cousin congratulates you on a new job. You send back a warm, specific reply that a system wrote and you approved with one tap. Nothing in it is false. You are grateful. But you did not choose those words, and your cousin will assume you did.

Some questions to start with:

  • Is the problem the words, or the impression that you sat down and wrote them?
  • Does it change if the message is a condolence rather than a thank-you, or a work email rather than a family one?
  • People have always used secretaries, speechwriters and greeting cards. What, if anything, is new?

Short answers are welcome.

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4 answers

  1. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    Greeting cards are the right comparison, and they show what's new. Nobody thinks the card company wrote to their aunt. The card is visibly bought, and the signature and the scrawl underneath carry the sincerity.

    An assistant-written reply is designed to be invisible. The ethical problem isn't delegation. It's that the tool's selling point is that nobody can tell.

  2. Ratna Wulandari

    Fellow

    In batik we distinguish batik tulis, drawn by hand with the canting, from batik cap, printed with a copper stamp. Both can be beautiful, and nobody is ashamed of cap. The dishonesty is only when stamped cloth is sold as tulis.

    So I agree with Derek. Use the stamp if you like, but don't sell it as hand-drawn. For a thank-you note, perhaps nobody cares. For a condolence, the family is paying for tulis.

  3. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    J. L. Austin's vocabulary helps here. He listed the conditions a speech act must meet to come off properly, and one of them is sincerity: an insincere thank-you is still a thank-you, but a defective one, what he called an abuse rather than a misfire. The Stanford entry on speech acts explains the distinction well.

    The interesting thing about your case is that the sincerity condition is met. You are grateful. So by Austin's test nothing is wrong with the thanking. Whatever is wrong lies elsewhere: in what the message shows rather than what it says. A handwritten condolence shows that someone spent an evening finding words for you. That showing is part of what the reader receives, and it is exactly what the assistant fakes.

    As a translator I live on the other side of this. My name is printed small on the cover, and readers still feel they are hearing the author. Nobody calls that a lie, because everyone knows translators exist. Perhaps that is the answer: what makes it honest is that the practice is known.

  4. Fajar Nugroho

    Fellow

    I think this is overthought. My mother can't type well, so my sister writes her messages for her, and everyone in the family knows it. Nobody calls that lying. If the feeling is real, the words are just transport.