{ "archive_path": "archive/1788527722.515148", "base_url": "www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507", "basename": "", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-04 13:15", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.theatlantic.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/index.html" }, "domain": "www.theatlantic.com", "extension": "", "hash": "1A2TGGMNGR6MRTMM7JG9", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.theatlantic.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.660348+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.174731+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.895389+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.669615+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:05.683109+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:02.013405+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpnqm1bv3p", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:02.002314+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Five years ago, people who hang out in the stranger corners of the web started arguing that the internet was mostly fake. It had been this way since about 2016, they said, when Google introduced its artificial neural network for machine translation. Supposedly, from that point forward, online interactions began to be replaced, until nearly every message and picture had been posted by a bot. Everywhere you looked, websites were \u201cempty and devoid of people,\u201d as one scholar of the theory put it.This wasn\u2019t true, but the core idea was tethered to a real phenomenon. Even way back then, in 2021, social platforms were awash in fake views, fake likes, fake traffic, and fake engagement. Some people figured that automation might one day take over the entire web and then our world. They were mostly being silly, or paranoid. Today they seem like \u2026 prophets?\u201cDead Internet\u201d theory is seeing a revival, this time in mainstream conversation. It\u2019s no longer strange to think that AI might be everywhere, edging out all forms of human interaction: bots talking to bots, all the way down. Every week we seem to take another step in that direction. In June, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly a quarter of American adults now use chatbots every day. Two months later, OpenAI announced an official ChatGPT integration for iMessage. Chatbot-generated text is already widely used for website filler, business emails, and cover letters. Will it soon be commonplace in private messages between friends and family?Read: Maybe you missed it, but the internet \u2018died\u2019 in 2016The ChatGPT-iMessage integration works on your desktop, not your phone. It doesn\u2019t send messages on your behalf until you\u2019ve reviewed and approved its suggestions. A similar plug-in has long been available for Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and many messaging apps already offer AI-suggested replies. To some extent, OpenAI\u2019s new product simply formalizes something that people had been doing on their own, either by pasting text from one window to another, or by improvising personal ChatGPT-linking software. (The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)\u201cLow-effort communication has always existed,\u201d Michael Pfister, a software developer living in Colorado, told me. He said that he had already vibe coded his own version of the iMessage tool months ago. ChatGPT pings him daily to let him know if he\u2019s missed any important questions in his group chat. He tried having it write a text to his friends, just as an experiment, but they immediately noticed that the message was AI. \u201cThey tried to prompt-inject me,\u201d he said: They asked the agent what Michael thought of them, in the hopes of tricking it into sharing his private thoughts. He told me that he mostly uses the tool for work and that he isn\u2019t interested in having AI communicate with his friends on his behalf in the future. \u201cI think relationships are experiential,\u201d he said.Max Weinbach, an analyst at a market-research firm in Connecticut, told me he uses ChatGPT to text with his bosses about work. \u201cIt just makes life easy,\u201d he said. It\u2019s hardly different from using Google\u2019s suggested email responses, which have been available for nearly a decade. Weinbach had no ethical qualms about switching to LLM-assisted communication, although he recognizes that it can be taken as a sign of disrespect. \u201cIt\u2019s not accepted or polite,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just kind of a rude thing to do.\u201dThese two are on the bleeding edge, yet exhibiting more restraint than some others. All over Reddit, my favorite repository for human drama, people are worrying about human drama that has a nonhuman interloper. New posts appear each day requesting help in figuring out whether something might have been created with AI: Is this apartment listing real? What about this dating-app profile? What about this video of a cute animal doing something amazing? (A bobcat flagging down a biker to help her rescue her kitten from the bottom of a random hole?)Many of the requests have a moralistic tone, and the poster comes to the crowd solemnly, with hesitation, because they know the truth may be painful. The most fraught discussions concern AI-generated personal messages. Guys on dating apps are using the technology. Sometimes long-term partners, friends, siblings, or parents do it too. \u201cIs this text apology written by ChatGPT?\u201d someone will ask. Or \u201cDid my mother use ChatGPT to write me a text of support on the morning of my divorce?\u201d The implication is betrayal.I spoke with Melissa Crowder, a 47-year-old from Alberta, Canada, who shared her own experience with AI texting in a July post on Reddit. She\u2019d spent all day having a \u201cnice conversation\u201d with a match from the dating app Feeld, then finally noticed that their repartee was off when he copy-pasted her own message back to her by mistake. At that point she realized all of his previous messages had been structurally similar\u2014usually two paragraphs of text followed by a question on a single line. And he\u2019d been using the word dangerously way too much. When she asked if he was using ChatGPT, he replied, \u201cBusted\u201d with a bunch of emoji, which also struck her as something ChatGPT might do. \u201cI\u2019m like, this is still ChatGPT.\u201d Then he unmatched her.Crowder would not have been that mad if the guy had just fessed up and said something normal in his own voice. She sometimes uses AI tools to help her express herself too. She said she has a tendency to ramble on and overexplain her feelings, so she\u2019ll use a site called Goblin Tools to self-edit. She might make a message to her ex-husband \u201cLess emotional\u201d (one of the choices in a drop-down menu) and get straight to the point. She also has a friend who sends AI-written texts from time to time. \u201cWhere I would draw my line is where you take the person out of the conversation,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I\u2019m vibing with a chatbot and then I meet the person in real life, what is that conversation going to look like?\u201dFor a recent paper, a group of researchers from the University of Washington and Arizona State University studied two popular Reddit forums\u2014r/RealOrAI and r/isthisAI\u2014to figure out how people go about determining which material is AI-generated and which is not. The most common mode of analysis evaluates the fundamental plausibility of an image or a video. (\u201cBabies do not nearly have that much coordination to both be standing up, talking so well and holding up that large cat.\u201d) A smaller number of comments in the study addressed some alleged telltale signs of AI-style texting, including the prevalence of \u201coverly ornate but meaningless phrases.\u201d Other people have noted LLMs\u2019 overreliance on certain words (delve is an oft-noted one), sentence structures (negative parallelisms), and punctuation (em dashes).The paper ends in an ominous tone. \u201cOur findings suggest that people are developing mental models of what AI-generated content looks like, built on personal experiences and beliefs developed over time,\u201d the authors wrote, before arguing that these mental models were unlikely to be accurate for long. The LLMs will evolve and stop doing the things that now make their output so easy to spot. In fact, the tricks enumerated in the paper are already getting old, one of the paper\u2019s authors, Tina Yeung, told me. \u201cI definitely think this is a snapshot in time,\u201d she said.The mere fact of people\u2019s concern about AI, and their anxiety over its incursion into day-to-day life, may be a snapshot too. Perhaps the stigma that now exists around using ChatGPT to text a friend or message on a dating app will fade in the years ahead. Maybe one day it will disappear altogether, and even our phones will end up empty and devoid of people. Or else I guess it\u2019s possible\u2014just possible\u2014that the Dead Internet theory is as silly as it ever was." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:00.115933+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:00.107617+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "What\u2019s Wrong With Using AI to Text? - The Atlantic", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:00.077572+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1788527722.515148/warc/1788538973", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-04T16:23:00.068427+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/index.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.905407+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "What\u2019s Wrong With Using AI to Text? - The Atlantic", "warc": null, "wget": "www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/index.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1788527722.515148", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-04T16:23:02.013405+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.174731+00:00", "path": "/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "6669287b-298b-425f-a10d-cd6bc7c3c285", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1788527722-import.txt" ], "tags": ",pool,drudge,war-wiki", "tags_str": "pool,drudge,war-wiki", "timestamp": "1788527722.515148", "title": "What\u2019s Wrong With Using AI to Text? - The Atlantic", "updated": "2026-09-04T16:22:53.174159+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-04 16:22", "url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/chatgpt-imessage-ai-texting/688507/" }