The Polite Email Incident
Introduced by: Dave Kaminski
Depth: Medium thread
Dave's opening story — and a genuinely interesting case study about how AI changes human communication, even when AI isn't involved.
What Happened
Dave had been absorbing Claude's communication style — polite, structured, paragraph-by-paragraph. When a colleague sent him an aggressive, all-caps email (accidentally hitting reply-all, so a respected 75-year-old third party witnessed it), Dave sat down and wrote the most polite response he could:
Dave: "I think what you're saying is... Oh, no, I'm sorry. What I'm hearing is... and then wrote the most polite email ever. It went on for, like, 500 words."
He wove in context from previous emails, acknowledged the colleague's points, and concluded by asking for an apology and suggesting they sit down with a group to sort things out. He signed it with the colleague's name — "which was even weirder."
The colleague's response was furious: "I refuse to speak to you now that you have put all my private information through a language model."
Dave's defense: he wrote the entire thing on his iPhone, with one finger.
Dave: "It became that seamless. I've become so synthetic."
The Broader Point
Dave sees this as an essay-worthy phenomenon:
Dave: "People can't parse the language from no language. And now it's imbued with a sense of distrust even among the most highly educated."
Politeness itself has become suspicious. A well-structured, measured response triggers the accusation of AI involvement. The colleague could have asked "Is this ironic? Is this AI?" but instead doubled down on the accusation.
Dave suggested Pete collect stories like this for an essay about "the human interface" with AI.
Related
- Dave Kaminski — who told this story
- Dave's Claude Struggles — the broader context of Dave's AI immersion
- Julie and Computing Metaphors — another example of AI-influenced communication
- Claude Code — the tool whose communication style Dave absorbed