By Dan Brooks
Publication Date: 2026-02-03 12:00:00
My friend recently attended a funeral and, halfway through the eulogy, became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the tell-tale proliferation of abstract nouns, a profusion of claims that the deceased was “not fair.” X– that was him Ycoupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes and more occurrences of the word work together than you would expect from a teammate on the Rec League hockey team. It was both too good in terms of grammatical correctness and not good enough in terms of specificity. My friend had no hard evidence that he was listening to AI, but his position – and I agree with him – is that when you know, you know it. His feeling was that he had just heard how a computer had stopped a man from thinking about his dead friend.
Large language models are increasingly relieving people of the burden of reading and writing, at school and at work, but also in group chats and when exchanging emails with friends. Guidelines are emerging in many areas: schools are drawing up guidelines on AI…
