I hope this article finds you well.

Did that make you cringe, ever so slightly? In the decades since the very first email was sent in 1971, the technology has become the quiet infrastructure of white-collar work.

Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. Instead, for many, it has morphed into something else: always there, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming.

Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox – drafting, summarising and replying.

My colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society found 45.6% of Australians have recently used a generative AI tool, 82.6% of those using it for text generation. A healthy chunk of that use likely includes email.

So, what happens if we end up fully automating one of the staples of the white-collar daily grind? Will AI technologies reduce some of the friction, or generate new forms of it? Dare I ask – are we actually about to get more email?

Why the printer isn’t dead yet

Soon after the advent of email, some voices in the business world heralded the coming end of paper use in the office. That didn’t happen. If you work in an office today, there’s a good chance you still have a printer.

In their 2001 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them.

Sellen and Harper show how paper use didn’t disappear with the rise of email and other digital communication tools; in many cases, it intensified. The takeaway isn’t that offices failed to modernise, but rather that work reorganised around what these new tools could do.

In this case, paper persisted not only out of habit, but because of what it affords: it is easy to annotate, spread out, carry and view at a glance. This was all too clunky (or impossible) to perform via the digital alternatives.

At the same time, email and digitisation dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing communication. It was far easier to send more messages, to more people, more often.

Circling back to today

Will AI be different? If early signs are anything to go by, the answer is: not in the way we might hope.

Like earlier waves of workplace technology, AI is less likely to replace existing communication practices than to intensify them – but at least it might come with better grammar and a suspiciously upbeat tone.

Some new AI tools offer to manage your inbox entirely, feeding into broader privacy concerns about the technology.

At this moment, what a lot of these products seem to offer is not an escape from email, but a smoothing of its rough edges. Workers are using AI to soften otherwise blunt requests, modify their tone or expand what might otherwise be considered too brief a response.

Rather than removing the need to communicate, these tools offer pathways to make a delicate performance easier.

What email is actually for

Email, like many forms of communication, is as much about maintaining everyday relationships as it is about the transfer of information.

At work, it’s often about signalling competence, responsiveness, collegiality and authority. “Just looping someone in” or “circling back” are all part of our absurd office vocabulary, a shared dialect that helps us navigate hierarchy, soften demands and keep things moving – all without saying what we really think.

If AI lowers the effort required to produce these signals, it won’t necessarily reduce their importance, but it could unsettle things in rather odd ways.

If more people use AI to draft emails they don’t particularly want to write, we end up with a game of bureaucratic “mime”: everyone performing sincerity and quietly outsourcing it, and no one entirely sure how much of their inbox was actually written by a human.

The labour of email was never just about crafting sentences. It’s always been the scanning, the sorting and the deciding. AI doesn’t remove this burden. If anything, it amplifies it.

When everything arrives polished, everything looks important. That points to a deeper question for the future of work: if AI can perform responsiveness, why are we generating so many situations that still require it?

Looking forward

What would a workplace look like if email wasn’t the default solution to every coordination problem? Perhaps fewer performative check-ins, “just touching base”, “looping you in” or “following up on the below”. More clearer expectations about what actually requires a response, and what doesn’t.

Email, like paper, is likely to persist for good reasons. It is simple, flexible and universal. It allows things to be deferred, revisited, forwarded and quietly ignored.

But if AI is going to change any of this, my hope is that it makes visible how much of this is ritual, how much is habit, and how much has long been unnecessary.

And if the machines are happy to keep saying “hope this finds you well” to each other, we might finally have permission to stop.

Daniel Angus receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Linkage Project LP190101051 'Young Australians and the Promotion of Alcohol on Social Media'. He is a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.

The government’s plan to fund Australian journalism through a levy on digital platforms rests on a sound premise: a healthy democracy depends on reliable information.

But this latest attempt — following the shortcomings of the News Media Bargaining Code — is a high-risk move.

We live in an era of polluted information with serious consequences for public debate and democratic health. In addition, professional journalism no longer holds the central role it once did in informing citizens or shaping political consensus.

Many Australians, particularly younger people, get their news and information from social media and increasingly from influencers and AI chatbots. ChatGPT alone has almost one billion weekly users globally.

Meanwhile, Australian influencers such as Konrad Benjamin, a former high school teacher breaking down politics for under-30s under the name Punter’s Politics, attract millions of likes, often surpassing mainstream outlets.

A complex, fragmented media environment

What is clear is that professional journalism is only one part of today’s fragmented information landscape. That landscape is increasingly polluted by misinformation and conspiracy theories that erode trust and weaken democracy. Globally, democracy is backsliding, with measurable decline for 20 consecutive years.

The United States offers a cautionary example of a deeply polarised information environment where falsehoods can spill into political violence. Properly supporting professional journalism is a means to filter extremism and help citizens distinguish fact from fiction.

Most Australians have little confidence in their own abilities to spot misinformation, with 74% reporting they find it difficult. This problem becomes urgent during election campaigns, when political falsehoods could potentially sway votes.

The Albanese government is responding to these threats in acknowledging the importance of journalism with draft legislation for a News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). It is a new scheme designed to fund Australian reporting by requiring digital platforms with revenues above $250 million (explicitly Google, Meta and TikTok) to contribute to a funding pool to be shared with public-interest news providers.

Why it’s a high-risk move

So why is this a high-risk endeavour that may meet the same fate as the NMBC, which saw Meta and, more recently, Google step back from paying for news content?

First, the positives. From the pooled funds it will generate stable funding for journalism even if platforms do not do deals, much needed for regional media and start-ups where funding is critical. In this way it also addresses a criticism of the NMBC, which was skewed to major media players such as News Corp and Nine.

It is also a stronger “stick” than the NMBC, imposing a 2.25% charge on high-revenue platforms unless they secure sufficient agreements with publishers, creating an incentive to negotiate.

But does it go far enough? Some independent media operators fear their outlets could still miss out on making deals under a 25% per-recipient cap that effectively means only four deals with big outlets need be done to be eligible for the offset.

The NBI has stronger leverage than the NMBC, which relied on ministerial designation that was never used. At first, the NMBC appeared successful without it, with Meta and Google signing more than 30 deals worth more than A$200 million. But Canada’s Online News Act shows the limits of this model when Canada sought to introduce a similar scheme: Meta removed news from its platforms entirely, avoiding the obligation and exposing its fragility.

The NMBC later weakened as Google became the only major platform doing deals in Australia. The company has recently signalled it will not renew some of these. This shift might help explain the timing of the NBI’s re-emergence and the structural shift from competition to tax law to compel platform compliance.

Now for the risks, of which timing is one. The NBI was drafted in 2024 but put on ice when US President Donald Trump voiced strong opposition to digital services taxes, calling them “discriminatory” measures targeting US companies. For some pundits, including Meta, the NBI is effectively a digital services tax.

Trump has previously threatened tariffs against countries pursuing such measures.

Against that backdrop, and given Australia’s recent exposure to trade tariffs and Trump’s criticisms of Australia over the Iran war, the timing of this renewed announcement is tricky. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has direct access to Trump, and both Meta and Google have already criticised the NBI.

While traditional media has welcomed the announcement through a signed joint statement, some platform criticisms warrant attention.

Why are multinational digital platforms that also distribute news and with more than $250 million in Australian revenue, such as Apple and LinkedIn, carved out of the scheme? And why is AI, with its rapidly growing user base and reliance on news content to train and refine systems, not included?

The explanations offered so far – that AI will be addressed separately and that Apple and LinkedIn employ editorial teams – are unconvincing.

Questions to answer

Then there are system design questions that the consultation period is sure to raise. For example:

• how do you define journalism in an age of influencers, social media and chatbots?
• who qualifies for funding?
• are the current eligibility criteria fit for purpose under the NBI to ensure the scheme supports continued investment in public-interest news, diversity of media voices, and quality journalism?
• will this include influencers such as Konrad Benjamin, who has large audiences for his explainer reporting?

This is a live debate that the short three-week consultation period is sure to raise before closing on May 18.

And perhaps the biggest risk of all: backfire. The NBI needs to avoid unintended consequences, such as when news was pulled from Meta’s platforms in Canada. The unintended outcome was long-term smaller audiences for professional journalism. Australia cannot risk backfire effects at a time when quality journalism has never been more critical for safeguarding democracy.

Andrea Carson receives funding from Australian Research Council examining media and political trust. She has previously received Meta funding to examine misinformation online.

Diana Bossio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.