A statement from Renfe and the great surrender

Journalist Pere Bosch shared on social media a message he received on WhatsApp from the press office of the Ministry of Transport. It was about the latest cyberattack suffered by Renfe and was the classic salad of substantial arguments and empty phrases and we will investigate everything and move along, move along. But the last paragraph was revealing: “This second version has a more institutional and firm tone, oriented towards media and public opinion, while maintaining a certain legal prudence (…) that protects Renfe against possible different conclusions from the final investigation”. It is obvious what has happened and the only doubt is whether the author's name is Claude, Copilot, Gemini or GPT.

The anecdote could be brushed off by saying that it is the classic blunder of someone who asked the AI to fix their style and copied and pasted without even taking the trouble to read the result. But the problem is not the paragraph that makes one look ridiculous and becomes vaguely viral. The drama is delegating style to the machine, because it means not having understood that the most profound messages travel in the form. The content may be more or less banal phrases, extracted from the first-year crisis communication manual. It is how you articulate it that counts. When I read and hear the apocalyptic voices that predict the takeover of power by machines, a tender smile generally comes to me: I am convinced that long before that happens, we humans will have immolated ourselves through a mixture of laziness and apathy in which we will abdicate our own judgment in favor of rules determined by the richest people in the world. AI is a tool that can be useful in writing tasks only if it adopts a subordinate role. When some writer succumbs to copying and pasting, I cannot help but think of them fallen to the ground, with the grass mown at their feet. And an AI in the shape of a scythe, with its sinister smile.