Just like you perhaps, I have a lot of mixed thoughts about AI these days. I'm not a coder at all, so I don't want to comment on the technology itself. But I care about people's feeling, especially the real feeling which means how true our relationships are, with friends, colleagues, and even family relatives.

In my previous life, I was a journalist and editor for half of my career so far for more than a decade, and I still take my writings seriously. This morning when I woke up and got on my Gmail, I noticed Google added the "Help me to write" tab on my Gmail, and I tried. "Can you help to write a thank-you letter for my friend?" And Gmail AI did. It did quite well as you can see the example I attach here.

I am amazed and I am also puzzled. Friends, I will take it as a serious offence if anyone writes me a thank-you email using AI. This is even worse than you don't send me a thank-you email and I can understand. People are always busy. I get it. But if you spend time writing something, please write your own words. I don't need an AI letter to pass on some "fake" thanks to me and I promise I will never do that to my friends.

I've been working on the interplay between technology and policy for the past seven years, and I'm more and more convinced everyday that the biggest challenge to technology and innovation is not how great the emerging technologies are but how you can explain the new technologies to the people and government and how such new technologies can also bear the due responsibilities. All relevant stakeholders can then make their well-informed decisions as they know both the opportunities and risks (or let's say where the limits are) brought by those new technologies.

You can't just blame the technologies when things go wrong. We are all human beings. We are the users, contributors, and creators of all the new technologies. I'm not saying (like what Elon Musk already suggested) that we should pause on AI. No we should not. Technological development will never wait for you as things are destined to happen as you can tell from the history. But what we need is to be fully aware of how we can put "people" at the heart of every kind of technology. We need to help the engineers behind those technologies to understand why on earth we innovate: It is not about making the machines faster and smarter but rather at the end of the day it is about how to help human beings have better life.

Just like the "fake" thank-you letter now Gmail can help me to generate within few seconds using AI, if you don't like it, then don't use it. I'm a human being. I'm not a robot. I won't accept an AI-powered thank-you letter. I hope you won't either. And that's how we can defend and improve the value and philosophy of human nature everyday.

This post is written by me, George Chen, not any AI.

Thank you for reading.