Emotional Outsourcing

Prompting a chatbot to write an apology or a love letter on your behalf is a form of emotional outsourcing—an act in which a person gives over a process paradigmatically expressive of emotions or interpersonal commitments to another entity or person to complete on their behalf. This paper explores the features of emotional outsourcing in the context of interpersonal communication. We argue that troubling, or dissonant, cases of outsourcing involve the absence of relevant parties from the emotional work of that relationship (‘the missing person problem’). This omission prevents certain relational goods from obtaining, including those necessary for the social formation of one’s personal identity. Far from allowing one to achieve a quality product, outsourcing one’s interpersonal writing can thus prevent important aims of that writing from coming about. We end by contrasting dissonant outsourcing with avenues for resonant outsourcing through shared participation in communal linguistic practices.