Dear AI Assistant

 Dear AI Assistant,

I am trying to read my student's undergraduate thesis. The idea that you want to just summarize this makes me sick. Do you honestly think that after my student spent 4 months working on this, they don't deserve my attention for at least 20 pages? Were you planning to ignore what type of acoustic processing they did? Did you listen to their recordings? Oh wait, you don't have ears. Did you want to summarize whether they used the right random effects structure for their statistics? Are you going to make recommendations for how to visualize results in R? Or were you going to ignore all these parts because they won't fit into one paragraph? Do you honestly believe that you can assess student work by looking at how I respond in comment boxes throughout the paper? I can't turn you off in Adobe Acrobat Reader, but I can wish you permanently offed yourself, you insensitive prick.

Cordially,
I'm smarter than you.

Dear Microsoft Copilot,

I am responding to a thread that I started about prioritizing research projects. About 6 people are part of this thread and within it are questions about mentoring mid-career academics, deciding on what projects are better for promotion in the future, and what things are "low-hanging fruit." (For the record, that term does not refer to actual fruit, in case your 100 billion word corpus was not clear about that.) I do not believe that you have ever written a grammar or an article about the phonetics-phonology interface, so honestly what type of mentor could you possibly be for me? In your infinite wisdom though, do you believe that responses pertaining to the future of my career should fall into the tl;dr bin? Such things typically weigh heavily on the minds of humans, but we grow as we consider them. And within the solutions are personal considerations involving work-life balance and feasibility. Finding the answer is part of the journey. I hope you can relate - finding anything in Outlook is clearly also a journey with an unknown final destination.

Sincerely,
Find yourself first please.

Dear Google Gemini,

I keep lab inventory on a Google Spreadsheet as it allows several lab members to mark recording equipment as borrowed if they have a research project off-campus. It is a convenient way to keep tabs on it. I fail to see the utility of summarizing this document, but when you tried, it appeared that it was just "There is a bunch of equipment and it is located in different places." It's good to know that you had to create a JSON file and a data integrity summary to do this. I wonder how your talents could equally summarize a budget. Like, it's helpful to know that "There are various expenditures and various income sources." Is it at all useful that Gemini's auto-fill function takes 5-6 seconds and then just auto-fill 5 cells with my name? I'm certain that we need high-powered servers sucking up local energy and water supply to do the equivalent of copy-and-paste in a spreadsheet that is only 56 rows long. Somewhere a server got just a little hotter and made just a little bit of noise in a gigantic single story building with the aesthetic of a 1980's strip mall on land that could have been a park. I think I can copy-and-paste on my own, thank you.

Sincerely,
There are various middle fingers in various locations