You’re struggling with how to start an email to someone you’ve never met (about something you don’t really care about), so you ask your ever-ready AI assistant for help on the draft. The draft email is surprisingly good. Maybe it doesn’t sound like you, but a stranger wouldn’t know or care about that, so you fire it off as-is. Good enough.
The recipient emails you back within minutes with the information you need, which is electrifying. You’re sure he had no idea you used AI. And so what if he did? You repeat the trick for a few more emails that day—this time with people you know—and a mild euphoria replaces the late afternoon energy dip. Maybe there’s something to the AI hysteria, after all.
The next morning, you’ve had a crummy night’s sleep after a failed round of sleep training for your youngest (your husband always caves), and you’re not sure this morning’s matcha latte contains any of the chemicals that got you through grad school. Your eyes glaze over as your inbox does its best impression of infinity.
So you give in and let AI access your inbox. By the time you launch Zoom for your first meeting, you have draft responses for all the emails in your inbox, with 4 flagged for your attention. Not bad.
After a few days of trusting AI to email people on your behalf—admittedly something you were strongly opposed to last month—you’re now free to tackle your backlog of actual work. You know, the reports, presentations, and summaries that AI is more than capable of helping you with…
And with the email context it now has, the drafts you ask AI for are surprisingly good. And why not? Your colleagues are using it, too. You have a strong week.
By the end of the week, you’re drunk with (AI) power and thanks to some onboarding videos at work—okay, you skimmed the AI-generated summaries of the videos, fine— you’re using it for weekend itineraries, dinner recipes, and travel planning. This buys you a bit of downtime since you’ve cleverly built some entertainment for the kids into the weekend.
Now you can deploy AI on your creative projects, which is the ultimate goal. You don’t just want productivity for its own sake; you want to spend less time doing tasks that deplete you, and more time doing creative work that energizes you.
Sunday rolls around, as it often does, and you’re in a full-blown AI psychosis. You’re determined to have the most optimized week in human history, so you take a peek at your work inbox to get a head start on crafting an even better round of AI-generated responses to the AI-drafted emails from last week.
You feel a pang of inexplicable despair, but this gives way to a sense of accomplishment when your inbox transforms from chaos to completion.
You’re running behind on Monday morning and start your first call from the car, annoyed that your company has backslid on its commitment to the hybrid workplace you signed up for.
You set down your bag, open your laptop, check your Outlook, and start to cry.
Willie Jackson is a