During the joyous holiday season, I am typically at my most serene and emotionally content. But one night this last December, against the cozy glow of my fake Douglas fir, I found myself acting completely out of character, sitting up to hurl insults at an advertisement on television. It’s worth mentioning that I’m a sucker for Christmas nostalgia, and in recent years I’ve found myself returning to my favorite compilation of holiday ads from the '70s and '80s for a little extra comfort. Only a few decades back, holiday advertising was softer and more amiable; commercials were designed to appeal to a customer’s heart, illustrating how everyday products and higher-end gift items could bring people together during the holidays. Yes, these ads were still cleverly capitalist, but they highlighted how we can integrate consumerism into a holiday without losing the harmonious spirit of the season.
So, maybe you can understand why an advert showcasing built-in AI features writing someone’s Christmas card caused me to fling expletives through the air like verbal snowballs. As if the mass normalization of generative AI wasn’t already terrifying, imagine picking up a Christmas card from your dearest friends or family and realizing that the “personalized” message is little more than hollow ChatGPT prose with a few holiday buzzwords thrown into the mix. Have we lost touch with intimacy to such a severe degree that we can’t even muster a few sentences about how our year went without relying on AI? A Christmas card, sent during the most mirthful time of the year, should come from the heart, not a program rapidly depleting our planet’s natural resources. We’re being sold products that covertly encourage us to let elegance and the connections we forge with others through earnest vulnerability fall away. With AI writing something as simple as a holiday greeting, we lose the charm in the occasional grammatical error, the typo and the silly dad joke. There’s worth and warmth in the work. Or, at least there used to be.
