The machines are corresponding
I got an e-mail a machine wrote. I nearly had a machine answer it.
Picture the e-mail. It comes from the other side of a small dispute. It is polite, complete, and organized under headings. It restates your position accurately before disagreeing with it. It closes with a summary of next steps. It is better written than anything the person has sent you before, and you are fairly sure they did not write it.
Now picture what you do next. You open a reply and start typing. Then, if you are honest, you stop, because you notice what you are about to do, which is paste the e-mail into a chatbot and ask it to draft a response in a firm but professional tone. You would read it over, change a word or two, and send it. The other side would paste your reply into their chatbot. Two people with a real disagreement, each of them a phone call away from the other, would set two pieces of software to exchanging paragraphs on their behalf, and both of them would feel very productive.
I have been on both ends of this. I have received the e-mail. I have caught myself with the reply half pasted. The times I have picked up the phone instead, the call has been short, and the person on the other end has usually sounded relieved. More than once they have admitted the e-mail was "cleaned up" by an assistant. Two e-mails cannot be embarrassed together. Two people can, and it helps.
What the machine removes
The reason people reach for the chatbot is not laziness. It is that a hard conversation is hard, and the machine makes it feel finished without making you go through it. You get a document that looks like the outcome of a difficult exchange, minus the exchange. It has the shape of resolution. It resolves nothing, because the other person has not heard you hesitate, and you have not heard them, and the two of you still do not know what the other one actually wants as opposed to what their software thinks a person in their position should say.
There is also a quieter cost. When I read a machine-written e-mail I stop reading it as a message from a person. I read it as a position paper. I respond to it as one. The tone escalates without anyone intending it to, because neither of us is talking to a human anymore. We are each talking to a document.
A small rule
If you would be embarrassed to say it in your own words, on the phone, to the person's face, then having a machine say it in better words does not fix the problem. It hides it. And if you would not be embarrassed, then you do not need the machine. Call them.
I do not think this will catch on. But I have started doing it, and my in-box is quieter, and the people I deal with seem to remember the calls.