"I hate it when you are having a conversation with someone and suddenly the person changes tone and you realize you are starting to have one with their ChatGPT."
This thing drives me insane. I wrote it on Twitter and complained about it to my friends for an entire evening. Not because using ChatGPT to write is wrong, quite the opposite. I use it too, I use it a lot, I use it enough to know when it walks into the room without saying hello. The problem is when you are having a normal conversation with someone and, all of a sudden, they are no longer on the other side. Their pocket-sized legal department is.
WhatsApp is already an emotionally unstable place. It was born for saying "I'll be there in 5 minutes" and somehow ended up containing arguments, apologies, quotes, 7-minute voice notes, screenshots of other chats, and sentences like ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BECAUSE THEY GHOST YOU, which is worse than getting a reply where they forget basic spelling. Luckily, my friends prefer insulting you instead of ghosting you, but that is another story.
Inside this already fragile ecosystem, the change in tone is devastating. First the person writes the way they always have: short words, random punctuation, grammar that is not grammar because, in the heat of the conversation, they start making a thousand typos just to reply before you while you are arguing. Then, after three minutes of silence, a perfect message arrives. Too perfect. A compact, polite, balanced block, with a final sentence that sounds like it came out of a mandatory course on difficult communication.
And you feel it immediately. You are no longer talking to Peppe, Luigi, Serena, or whoever it was. You are talking to "I understand your point of view, however I believe it is important to clarify a few aspects". At that point you do not want to reply anymore. You would rather call your lawyer.
The real disappointment is not that they used AI. The disappointment is that they stopped risking their own voice. They delegated the discomfort, the embarrassment, the anger, even the confusion. All human things, unpleasant maybe, but at least alive. Instead, this sterilized, spotless prose arrives. It does not say "I am hurt", it says "I consider it appropriate to express my disappointment regarding the situation".
Translation: someone asked ChatGPT to sound like an adult. Very serious.
Because in difficult conversations, you do not always need to be flawless. Sometimes you need to be recognizable. I want to understand whether you are angry, disappointed, confused, passive-aggressive, or simply hungry. This is important information. If instead you send me a paragraph with the tone of a corporate press release, I no longer know whether I should reply to you, your therapist, your lawyer, or the prompt "make this message assertive but not aggressive".
The result? You write to a person and get a policy back. You try to clear up a misunderstanding and the other side sends you emotional compliance documentation. The only thing missing is a PDF attachment titled "Conversation_summary_final_v2".
If I have to argue with a machine, at least I want to know beforehand. I get ready, open a support ticket, and immediately ask to cancel the monthly renewal of the friendship. Now.