Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

gmail

2018-10-26 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
gmail
Votey panel for gmail
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A man marvels at Google's auto-generated email responses, saying they "save me so much time" and that "it's like they can read my mind." He clicks on one of the suggested replies. The email he has received is a deeply personal and desperate message from someone named Susan, confessing her love, describing their mutual unhappiness, and begging him to run away with her. The suggested replies are the blandly cheerful "Nice!" and "Got it. Thanks!" He clicks "Nice!" without hesitation.

The comic takes Gmail's Smart Reply feature -- which generates short, generic responses to emails -- and applies it to a situation where a generic response is wildly inappropriate. The man's claim that the auto-replies "read his mind" takes on a darkly comic dimension: either he genuinely does not care about Susan's heartfelt plea, or he is so habituated to letting technology handle his communication that he does not even read his emails anymore.

The Humor

The humor works through the jarring contrast between the emotional intensity of Susan's message and the chipper vacuity of the auto-response. "Nice!" is perhaps the worst possible reply to someone baring their soul and proposing they abandon their lives together. The fact that the man clicks it happily -- confirming that the AI does indeed "read his mind" -- implies either that he is a sociopath or that modern technology has made us so lazy that we will let algorithms handle even the most consequential moments of our lives. The comic is also a sharp observation about how Smart Reply's relentlessly positive suggestions ("Nice!", "Got it. Thanks!", "Sounds good!") are comically inadequate for the full range of human communication.

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