AI Compositions and Their Influence on Letters as Signals

In Cory Doctorow's latest column, he brings up a potential unintended byproduct of overusing "large language models," aka chatbots such as ChatGPT:

Plausible Sentence Generators

He recalls a recent incident when he wrote a letter of complaint to an airline, threatening to sue them in small claims court, and fed it to such a program for rewriting. He was surprised at the high quality of the result. The site changed his pretty good "legal threat letter" into a noticeably stronger "vicious lawyer letter."

Letters of that type, as well as another of his examples, letters of recommendation from college professors, are performative. They transmit not only information but "signals," as Doctorow puts it. A stern letter from a lawyer sends the message that somebody cares enough about an issue to spend a considerable amount of money hiring a professional to write the letter. A recommendation from a professor signals that the he or she considers the student worthy of the time required to write the recommendation.

One of Spider Robinson's Callahan's Bar stories mentions a similar performative function that shows up in an oral rather than written format, spousal arguments. The winner of the argument is likely to be the one who dramatizes his or her emotional investment in the issue with more demonstrative passion than the other spouse.

In the case of written performances, Doctorow speculates on what will happen if AI-composed (or augmented) epistles become common. When it becomes generally known that it's easy and inexpensive or free to write a letter of complaint or threat, such messages won't signal the serious commitment they traditionally do. Therefore, they'll become devalued and probably won't have the intended impact. The messages (like form letters, though Doctorow doesn't specifically mention those) will lack "the signal that this letter was costly to produce, and therefore worthy of taking into consideration merely on that basis."

I'm reminded of the sample letters to congresscritters included in issues of the MILITARY OFFICER magazine whenever Congress is considering legislation that will have serious impact on members of the armed services and their families. These form letters are meant to be torn out of the magazine, signed, and mailed by subscribers to the presiding officers of the House and Senate. But, as obvious form letters, they clearly don't take much more effort than e-mails -- some, because envelopes must be addressed and stamps affixed, but not much more. So how much effect on a legislator's decision can they have?

Miss Manners distinctly prefers old-fashioned, handwritten thank-you notes over e-mailed thanks because the former show that the recipient went to a certain amount of effort. I confess I do send thank-you notes by e-mail whenever possible. The acknowledgment reaches the giver immediately instead of at whatever later time I work up the energy to getting around to it. So, mea culpa, I plead guilty! However, the senders of the gifts themselves have almost completely stopped writing snail-mail letters, so in communication with them, e-mail doesn't look lazy (I hope), just routine. Context is key.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.