The Robot Copied My Handwriting. My Mother Was Fooled

The service recreates your handwriting from samples, so your letters look handwritten. I used it to send my mother a birthday card. She cried and said my handwriting had gotten so much better. I have not been able to write a real letter since.

The service needed a hundred words of my handwriting to learn it. I wrote the hundred words carefully, the way you write when you know a machine is watching. It learned. It produced a font that is my handwriting, but better: straighter lines, even spacing, none of the tremor, none of the smudge.

I typed the birthday card. The service rendered it in my handwriting. It looked like me, the way a photograph looks like you, which is to say it looked like the best version of me, the one who never writes in a hurry. My mother called me, crying, and said it was the most beautiful card she had ever received, and that my handwriting had gotten so much better.

I have not been able to write a real letter since. I hold the pen, and I look at the paper, and I think about the machine that does it better, and my hand seizes up. I have started to feel that my own handwriting is a rough draft of the machine's version, that the thing I have been doing with a pen all my life was just practice for the moment I would outsource it.

The machine has my handwriting now. It has the hundred words I wrote, and it can make them say anything. It can write my apologies, my thank-yous, my I-love-yous, in a hand that is mine and not mine. I have started to wonder what a signature means when the hand can be rented.

Last week I wrote my mother a real letter, by hand, badly, with the tremor and the smudge and the misspelled word I crossed out. I mailed it. She called me and said it was perfect, and she said my handwriting looked like it used to, and I realized she had never wanted the better version. She had wanted mine. The machine had fooled her for a day. The real thing had been the point all along, and I had almost outsourced the only thing my hand still does that no machine can do for me, which is be mine.