When “Quick Email” Means “War and Peace with Footnotes”

Gemini Writes Your Emails
Quick and Professional *
(* TL;DR)

Brevity. What’s that?

It Was Supposed to Be Five Words.

Meeting’s at 3. See you then.

Done. Simple. Takes ten seconds to type.

But no—you’re using AI now. You’re efficient. You’re modern. So you tell Gemini: “Write a quick email to Sarah about the 3 PM meeting.”

Back comes 400 words.

There are section headers. A three-paragraph intro explaining why meetings exist. Phrases like “pursuant to our synergistic collaborative endeavors” and “temporal coordination optimization.”

It signs off “With warmest professional regards, [Your Name], Senior Collaborative Strategist.”

Sarah works in accounting. She doesn’t want your warmest regards. She wants to know when to show up so she can get her free coffee and complain about Dave from IT.

The “Brief” That Wasn’t

One Reddit user asked Gemini to text their roommate about pizza. Five-word ask: pepperoni or mushroom?

Gemini delivered “Collaborative Dinner Framework: A Comparative Analysis of Topping Optimization Strategies with Consideration for Dietary Preferences and Flavor Profile Alignment.”

The roommate replied: “just get pepperoni wtf is wrong with you”

Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. AI saw “food question” and decided this required a peer-reviewed proposal.

Another person asked AI to decline a meeting invite. Wanted to say “Can’t make it, sorry.”

Got back: “Strategic Priority Realignment Initiative: A Framework for Capacity-Constrained Calendar Optimization” followed by three paragraphs of corporate therapy-speak about bandwidth limitations.

Just say no. That’s it. Two words. AI used 200.

You’re Now the Editor

Here’s the trap: You used AI to save time. Now you’re spending five minutes hacking through verbal underbrush trying to find the one useful sentence buried in the forest of bullshit.

Delete the intro. Cut the strategic framework nonsense. Remove “synergistic.” Kill “pursuant to.” Eliminate the closing that sounds like you’re retiring from the State Department.

What’s left? “Meeting’s at 3.”

The thing you could’ve typed in ten seconds.

But it gets worse. Because AI sounds so professional and confident, you start wondering: Maybe Sarah DOES need three paragraphs about collaborative endeavors? Maybe “Meeting at 3” is too casual?

No. Sarah needs five words. AI gave you a TED Talk.

This is how AI breaks your brain. You start doubting that clear, simple, direct communication is enough. You’ve been conditioned to think that if it doesn’t sound like a McKinsey consultant wrote it, it’s not professional.

The Prompt Death Spiral

Fine. Be more specific. “Write ONE sentence. Casual. Under fifteen words. No fancy language.”

Now you’ve spent 30 seconds writing instructions to prevent AI from doing what it desperately wants to do: turn everything into a dissertation.

Next time: “No subheadings. No ‘synergistic.’ Nothing about frameworks. Just the meeting time.”

You’re in a prompt arms race with software that wants to be helpful by being as unhelpful as possible.

At some point you’re writing longer prompts than the email you wanted in the first place.

You’ve become an AI wrangler. Your job is now “preventing Gemini from Gemini-ing all over your inbox.”

What Went Wrong

AI learned from millions of professional documents. Formal emails. Business correspondence. Academic papers. The kind of writing where more words = more serious = more professional.

So when you say “write an email,” it gives you what it learned: structure, formality, completeness. It doesn’t know Sarah. It doesn’t know you email her forty times a day about random shit. It just knows emails look like THIS in the training data.

The result? Every simple request becomes a formal production.

You wanted a text message. AI heard “craft a communications strategy.”

You asked for quick. AI delivered comprehensive.

You needed five words. AI brought 500.

Logic to Apply

The promise was that AI would save time and make us more efficient.

The reality is we’re now managing AI’s inability to understand context, scale, or the concept of “just answer the damn question.”

We’ve created assistants that need assistance. Tools that create more work. Helpers that require supervision.

Want to email Sarah about the meeting? Type it yourself. Five words. Ten seconds. Zero synergistic alignment required.

Because by the time you’ve written the perfect prompt, edited the output, and deleted all the corporate word vomit, you could’ve already sent the message, gotten Sarah’s reply, and moved on with your actual work.

AI didn’t make email easier. It made “send quick message” into a project management task.

That’s not efficiency. That’s just expensive irony.

—

Editor’s Note: And if you think writing emails with AI is challenging, try writing an article. Oh wait, never mind.

Editor’s Note 2: Asked ChatGPT and Grok for thoughts on article—both gave me 400 words to say yes. Who says irony is lost on AI?