To the Guy I Didn’t Invite to My Wedding
“Look, man, I saw the text last week. But I was on my honeymoon. Bigger priorities, eh? I’m back now, though. And I felt I owed you a response.
I understand you’re upset, and I totally hear your point about us growing up as childhood best friends, and going to college together as roommates, and me being the best man in your wedding, and us grabbing weekly beers. And I’m sad that you’re cancelling for this week.
But, please, just let me explain?
I’m guessing you know by now that AI is reshaping the way our world works. It’s crazy stuff. I know you live under a rock, but brother, you must know how wild these AI tools are. And how I like to stay on top of things. For my career, and all that.
Well, turns out that AI is really good at is scraping data and then compiling that data into lists. It does this lighting fast. For a sales example (I know, classic me, always going on about sales!), imagine you wanted to build a list of every single person with the job title “Director of Marketing” at companies that raised money in the past 6 months.
Type in the prompt and it spits out the list. That easy.
Anyway, I’d been using the tool so much for work that I thought I’d try it out for my wedding. It was all rather intuitive. First, I connected the tool to all of my personal data: iPhone, MacBook, messaging applications, calendar. Then I had an army of AI scrapers comb through my contacts and assign a weighted score across a few different categories: Friendship, Funniness, Attractiveness, How Much My Fiancé Likes Them, and so on. I even let the AI decide who should sit with who at dinner based on deep-learning social awareness algorithms!
The AI got to work. A few minutes later—and all my monthly credits exhausted!—I had scores for everyone. I told ChatGPT how many seats we had available, and it identified the score on the curve below which people wouldn’t receive an invite.
Sadly, you didn’t make the cut. It was 4.87, and you came in at 4.82. Very close!
I wondered if there had been a mistake. But, you know. The list had already been set. And anyway, there were so many inputs: 37 separate AI scrapers working through my WhatsApp messages, emails, browsing history, and social media.
I don’t know why you didn’t make it. Maybe because we mostly talk at the pub? In any case, you scored low. And, I thought, maybe it’s arrogant for me to assume that you should get an invite over some of the others who did make the cut. Maybe it’s recency bias because we got beers a week before the engagement (thanks again for the proposal advice). Would it be fair to trust my own anecdotal experience over an objective look at the data? I asked ChatGPT and it agreed that I might be overindexing on emotional anecdotes over the more reliable weighted scoring system. And that was that.
I hope you can understand. And sorry again. Drinks next week?"
This is a well-structured and polite response to your friend’s angry text message. Would you like me to edit further, or are we good to send?
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