“I read your message more than once before responding, as I felt it deserved that pause,” GRK’s email began. Was this truly from him? A quick check of the “From” field confirmed it was—GRK’s display name alongside the email address left no doubt.
Surprise was giving way to amusement. The tone was uncharacteristic of GRK. It carried several cultural risks in a hierarchical environment, and GRK, like many other Indians, was a quintessential product of such a culture.
I reread the line. My message “deserved that pause,” it said, as though evaluating my words. In high-power-distance cultures like the Indian social and professional environment, it is generally the superior’s role to evaluate the quality of communication, not the subordinate’s. GRK, being far below me on the professional ladder, was stepping out of line by positioning himself as a judge of my message. His implied equality was, in a sense, a break from the hierarchical culture he was raised in.
And then there was the over-familiarity of the line: “…I felt (it deserved that pause).” Professional communication in India typically remains formal and indirect. A subordinate telling his superior about his “feeling” in a certain way about the boss’s email can be seen as overstepping professional boundaries. GRK would never be one to cross those boundaries.
Next, the subordinate’s candid statement that he had to “pause” and “think” before responding. A subordinate, in a hierarchical professional environment, pausing and thinking about a superior’s message! Was he being critical of the superior’s email? Didn’t this at least suggest he was defensive?
In other words, GRK was evaluating my message which, though a positive transformation, would be perceived as presumptuous in Indian professional and social culture, where professional interactions are often dictated by rank rather than collaborative merit. If at all a subordinate shows their “deep thought,” it should be to demonstrate their diligence and respect for the superior’s expertise.
Why was GRK being so “impudently reflective” rather than respectfully thorough, as was his wont? The truth dawned on me: it wasn’t GRK speaking—it was an AI writing agent at the helm. The AI had used GRK’s prompts and delivered an email whose directness and over-familiar tone were beyond GRK’s understanding. In the pre-AI age, GRK would have written something like, “Sir, your email offered valuable insights…”
This is the case with the emails I receive from my colleagues nowadays: they are “voiceless.” In the past, their voices were distinct. GRK’s emails, for instance, were indirect and over-polite. But their characteristic quality was a huge gap between intention and expression, and the struggle was touching. PR’s emails were long-winded, and his overly formal apologies—a la Jane Austen's Mr Collins—always stood out. NB’s were lengthy, rambling, illogical, and extremely painful to read. LV was fond of obsequious vocabulary and hyperbolic praise, but his diction was distinctly different from NG’s unctuous language, which was greasy to the touch, as it were. The emails of all these colleagues shared some common qualities: they abounded in tense mixing, false inversion, double past, syntactical non sequiturs, overuse of the definite article, and weakening intensifiers, among others. But they had a touch of individuality: each email writer had a signature style that was distinct, consistent, and recognizable. You could “hear” each writer’s “voice,” and this lent a touch of authenticity to the emails.
I miss those voices now. All of them use generative AI, which “sanitizes” their overuse of “softeners” and indirectness, placing their ideas in a generic template with acceptable English. In the emails of the pre-AI age, the ideas and language were often laughable, but the writers spoke in their own voices. Even now, when they make oral presentations, I hear their voices. But when they write, they all sound uniform, indistinguishable, and intellectual. Even when they—the AI Writing Assistant, I mean—use the personal pronoun “I,” it sounds distant and impersonal.
“Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll / Who wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll,” wrote David Garrick about Oliver Goldsmith (“Poll” was a common nickname for a parrot). While my colleagues continue to sound as they have always done when they speak, they now speak in borrowed voices when they write, sounding like Oxbridge or Ivy League scholars.
AI writing ill-fits them. Two
descriptions from literary criticism come to mind. “Matthew Arnold in a sari,”
remarked Gordon Bottomley, reacting to Victorian sentiment and style being awkwardly
dressed in Indian themes in early Indian English poetry. “Shakuntala in
skirts,” said an amused Gokak, who found the English translations of Indian
poetry as stiffly Western.
