I agree. I actually think it’s a net negative as well for friendships. As in the case of OP, I would rather get an original email from the sender saying they couldn’t make it, so let’s meet the next day, but instead I have to read thru several paragraphs of boilerplate and AI crap instead, which wastes my time, and I know the sender did it, so I’m mad at them for being impersonal. At some point, we’re just going to have people’s AI responding to each other without any person actually reading it.

We’re only doing this because every company doesn’t want to be left behind so they go all in. It feels like Ian Malcolm said it best in Jurassic Park

“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”

Any new automobile manufacturer has to do that initially in order to make enough money to get the manufacturing and supply chain developed enough to create a car for the masses. They start with a lower volume and higher priced car to get the excitement for the product. Once they have that, they are able to start assembling a larger volume at a lower price.

I really hate it. In fact, it’s hard to listen to because it’s been built to reply in such a sycophant way. Everything is enthusiastic and positive when that’s not how real life is. I’m paraphrasing obviously, but it’s like “OMG you’re wearing a leather jacket and a light colored shirt, you’re so cool!” and “You’re in an industrial place with lighting, that’s so awesome!”

I’d rather they work on code that optimizes the validity of the results and prevents hallucinations rather than work on emotive responses.

Fear. It’s that simple. An authoritarian mindset is one predicated on fear. After 9/11, Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush used fear to drive their policies of restrictive freedoms. They pushed these through so they could amass additional powers and push government money towards their friends. Once these freedoms are gone, they almost never come back. The Republican party has been running on a campaign of fear ever since. Quite honestly, they’ve used fear as their driving force since the '80s. Back then it was fear of the Communists, and then it was fear of 'big government" and then it was fear of immigrants, or “the gays”, or restrictions of the second amendment, or caravans of people coming up from South America. Fear is the only thing that they can run on since they have no actual plans to move our country forward.