Comrades
People have strong opinions about AI, ranging from “What will happen when it replaces us?” to “I ask it everything!”
But AI is not a monolith. (These days, I use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini depending on what I hoped to accomplish.) Further, how we use AI plays a significant role in what we get from it.
You can ask AI simple questions or give it straightforward tasks, such as “What does notorious mean in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of that title?” or “How do I apply for a new passport?” As I’ve written, when I am editing I adopt an approach that includes thoughtful prompting.
My friend J— wrote these sentences in an article:
"Outside of our weekly Monday hour meeting, we texted or emailed or called each other almost daily. In short, in focusing on a common cause, we became comrades and a micro-community."
If you ask AI to edit it, you might get this:
"Outside of our hour-long meetings, we texted, emailed, or called almost daily. What emerged was more than a campaign team—we became a micro-community, bound together by a shared goal."
It’s good, isn’t it? The reader doesn’t need to know that the meetings were on Mondays; reintroducing the purpose of the meetings (a campaign) is helpful; and shared goal arguably echoes the campaign idea better than common cause.
But is it really better? Common cause, which is nicely alliterative, implies a type of effort that aligns well with comrade—but where did comrade go? That’s an important word, and J— clearly used it intentionally. But AI, recognizing the potential polarization of the word’s socialist implications, deleted it. AI often avoids conflict.
I provided the same AI with the same article and a more specific prompt: “Please edit as lightly as possible. Eliminate unnecessary words but do not change vocabulary unnecessarily.” The result for these same sentences was:
"Between meetings, we texted, emailed, and called nearly every day. Focused on a shared cause, we became comrades—a small but strong community."
Once again, AI tightened J—’s original text. But this time, it preserved the meaningful socialist overtones.
Currently, AI replaces us only if we allow it to. We can retain our humanity—and even produce better work—if we use it as a tool to an end rather than an end in itself.