Public Conversations with Bots

Is it weird to talk to AI out loud in public? My officemates say yes, and they have not let it go. I say it’s the oldest way writers have ever worked.

I share an office in downtown Fernandina Beach with a handful of other business owners. We’re close, we like each other, and we could not be more different. Different businesses, different personalities. That’s the whole value of the place, and it’s why I write a comic about this room that some of you see in this letter every week.

The arguments are the best part. The silliest one I can remember was whether sending someone a Calendly link is pretentious. One camp holds that making a person click into your open slots is hoity-toity. I say it’s a courtesy. We were on that for weeks.

My officemates caught me talking to a bot in a coffee shop

The newest argument is about me. One of them walked into a coffee shop last week and found me at a corner table, alone, talking out loud to the bot on my laptop. Not a call. Nobody on the other end. I was dictating into Claude Code and watching the work build itself on the screen while I talked. He saved it for the office, and then he made it last an hour. Talking to a bot in public, in front of strangers, like a man with no supervision.

I’ll grant them the bot. Talking out loud to a screen that never answers is new, and new looks silly. So once they were done with that, I tried what felt like an airtight defense: how is it different from taking a Zoom call in a coffee shop?

They didn’t concede. They escalated. You take Zoom calls in a coffee shop? Out loud, to a screen, while strangers eat? Also ridiculous. So I pushed once more: what’s the difference between talking to someone on my screen and talking to someone across the table? The answer, more or less, was that there just is one and everybody knows it.

People carry strong, mostly unexamined rules about where you’re allowed to talk and to whom. I want to know yours. One click and I’ll count it:

The case against talking to a bot at breakfast

Let me make their case for them, because they’re not wrong about how it looks. If you sat at the next table at Mocama, you would hear a grown man say, out loud, to a bot: no, that’s not quite right. We need to go back to the messaging framework. I don’t love our approach here. Then four uninterrupted minutes on the structure of a blog post nobody has read yet. Nothing answers me. A cursor moves. I get it. That is a strange thing to overhear at breakfast.

Why I dictate to AI anyway: talking hands over the whole context

Here’s why I do it anyway. Something happens when I talk that never happens when I type. Typing is a narrow door: my thoughts line up single file and half of them give up waiting. Out loud I hand over the whole thing at once, the backstory and the doubt and the reason behind the ask. Everything I’ve learned about working with AI comes down to that one word, context, and every company building these tools says the same. The more of the real situation the bot has, the more the work sounds like the person who asked for it. It’s how I run design at scale that comes out looking like the brand I want, how I build a website in an afternoon, how this letter got drafted. The setup is in a companion field guide if you want it. This essay is the why.

None of which makes it look any less strange from the next table. When AirPods came out, my friends made fun of me for tapping my ear to answer a call, and a year later those same friends were tapping their ears. Somebody has to look strange in the meantime. I’ve made my peace with it being me.

Writers have been thinking out loud since Homer

The etiquette is the only new part. Writers have been thinking out loud for about as long as there has been writing. Cicero, the Roman lawyer whose speeches are still taught two thousand years later, worked out his orations aloud, pacing a room with nobody in it but his secretary, Tiro, who had to invent a shorthand just to keep up. Go back further and writing was talking. The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed to be spoken and heard, carried voice to voice for generations before anyone wrote them down. And then there’s the one I can’t shake: John Milton went blind in his forties and then composed Paradise Lost, ten thousand lines built in the dark and dictated each morning to whoever could hold a pen. He’d wake with the verses ready and wait, he said, to be milked. Nobody says Milton didn’t write it. The words were his. The hands were help. That was never the interesting part.

Talking to my bots has made me feel more human, not less

Here’s what I know from the corner table: talking to my bots has made me feel more human, not less. My actual voice, the one with breath in it, the one that wanders and doubles back and lands somewhere true, is back inside my work for the first time since I left the radio. Homer sang. Cicero paced. Milton waited in the dark. I talk to my bots at Mocama while the French press goes cold, and I have never felt more like a writer in my life.

The office still thinks it’s weird. They’re probably right. Come sit at the table anyway.

— Joe

P.S. Vote in the poll above, then try the experiment: tomorrow, dictate one thing you’d normally type. A prompt, an email, a hard message. Say the whole thought, backstory included, and send what comes out. Then tell me what changed. Subscribers can just hit reply on Sunday’s essay; I read and answer everything.

Last week’s poll: do you agree with Dre?

That’s the vote. You think Dre was wrong, and it wasn’t close. It surprised me, and I loved seeing where you all landed. My Instagram followers leaned the other way. Here it was overwhelming.

Then the emails came, and they were better than the vote. Musicians. Former teachers. People telling me exactly where they stand. That’s the whole reason I do this. It was never meant to go one direction. Keep them coming, and if you know someone who’d argue with me, send them the essay.