Why AI Summarization of Messages and Captions Makes Me Uncomfortable

Thoughts from an msn/icq cry baby.

When I first saw these, I thought my friends were captioning their own photos. But something felt off.

(Images below)

I asked them to confirm if it was actually them.

It wasn’t.

I can’t tell if these AI generated captions and AI summarizing of text/chat messages, bother me for three reasons.

One:

They feel dull. Like when Instagram first started and there was a flood of captions that were either not thought through or overly thought through, trying to aid the photos but ultimately unnecessary.

Two:

I want to interpret the photos myself or have my friends share their captions.

I don’t want to read a subpar explanation.

I want their witty, personality infused, messy captions. I want to read their thoughts. I’m friends with them because I enjoy engaging with them. Who they are. And what they say.

Three:

The mere fact that it bothers me.

I think it’s telling me that I value writing and words more than I realized. More than I anticipated.

It irks me knowing that the efficiency of AI summarization might dampen the content we share. And I realize this is already happening. But somehow, micro form videos and choosing to gloss over lengthy captions didn’t bother me as much as the possibility of reading someone’s words, of feeling their inflection, their tone, and losing that.

I don’t mind an edit or a starting point using AI; it can be a helpful tool.

But the paradox is becoming harder to ignore.

Someone, please, tell me that I’m overthinking this. That it’s actually fine.

That it’s just the usual growing pains of technology evolving. And that my discomfort is just tied to my own Western privilege: the luxury of spilling feelings about self-actualization, while the world moves on. That I still reserve the right to read the messy elongated caption or short witty comment someone wrote without AI summarizing it. Tell me the comment section won’t be affected.

Supplementary Thoughts

The screenshots here are from my notifications for Lapse.

I’m not entirely sure if this is a Lapse notification thing or an Apple notification thing.

But it’s got me wondering, is this my phone’s personality?

And now I’m thoroughly intrigued again.

Is this my phone’s way of getting its thoughts out? Is my phone’s personality just b-rated wit with monetary a+ sharpness? (Ie… a mirror of me?)

How did it formulate these? Based on me? My conversations? An averaging of data samples over a short or long period of time?

Should I put them into ChatGPT and ask for a character summary?

I will note when I asked my friends about sharing this, some of them did really enjoy the captions. So maybe I am overthinking. What’s new.