What May My Proxy Say for Me?

The hotel replies to Priya’s booking request with a counteroffer. A room at €400 a night, with a free upgrade. (The amounts are illustrative.) The system holds a grant to book a refundable room up to €350, and it has just drafted a response. The text of the draft is four words: €400 works for me.

Those four words could be four different things. They could be a draft that Priya has not yet seen. They could be a signal in a negotiation, a way of testing whether the hotel will come down. They could be an acceptance of the offer. Or they could be a binding commitment, with a cancellation window attached. The text is the same in each case. What differs is what has been done: how much authority the act needs, how much it commits her to, and whether anyone can take it back.

The last chapter ended on this. A message sent in Priya’s name is not just text. It is an action, and it has to be treated as one.

What may the system say for her, and under what authority?

Speech is typed by the act

The first thing to see is that communication acts are not equally consequential, even when they use identical words:

draft  ≠  send  ≠  assert  ≠  promise  ≠  commit

A draft is harmless: it is a proposal that exists for her to look at. Sending it is a different act, because now someone else has it. Asserting something about her makes a claim that others will rely on. A promise creates an obligation. And a commitment binds her in ways that are hard to undo. A single permission to “speak for me” covers none of this properly. It would be too wide for the cases that matter and too narrow for the cases that do not.

The better vocabulary names the act. A working list:

draft      prepare words for her to review
inform     relay a fact
assert     make a claim about her, or on her behalf
disclose   reveal something private
request    ask for something
offer      put forward terms
negotiate  move between positions
accept     agree to terms
promise    commit to a future act

Each of these has its own price in authority. Drafting, relaying a fact and making a request need little. Negotiating needs more, with limits on what can be conceded. Making a claim about her needs more again. Revealing something private needs authority specific to that disclosure. And accepting terms or promising something needs explicit commitment authority of its own.

Speech authority is typed by the act, not granted as one undifferentiated permission.

Here is the hotel negotiation in this form:

The system may:
- draft a counteroffer
- explain Priya's constraints
- ask for clarification

The system may not:
- accept the offer
- promise delivery by Friday
- disclose her internal budget limit

Each line needs a different check. Drafting needs nothing beyond her grant to work on the booking. Explaining her constraints is a claim about her, and it depends on which constraints she is willing to have stated. Accepting is a commitment. Promising delivery by Friday creates an obligation that exists in the world after the message is read. And disclosing her budget limit reveals information that cannot be taken back.

A promise is the clearest case, and it is worth a line of its own: a promise is language that creates an obligation. It is not merely a sentence. It changes the social state between her and the person who hears it. That is exactly why speech belongs inside the delegation model, and it is why the typed vocabulary is more than bookkeeping.

Speaking for her, and speaking as her

A distinction that matters more than any of the acts is how the speaker is represented to the person listening:

speak for me   the system communicates under delegated authority
speak as me    the recipient is led to believe Priya herself wrote it

The system should never need to pretend to be Priya in order to represent her interests. A proxy, as the word is used in this part, is a system acting under a grant and saying so. It is not a copy of her and it does not stand in for who she is. Speaking for her is a recognised and honest arrangement: an assistant, an agent, a representative who says who they are and on whose behalf they speak. Speaking as her is substitution. It makes the recipient believe something false about who they are dealing with, and it hands the system a power that the delegation never granted.

This is the identity point of the earlier chapter, seen from the other side. The text of a message that matches what she would have said is not authorship by her. A message from the system carries its attribution.

Provenance should explain agency

What should the recipient be told? The usual answer is a label such as “AI-generated”. That says very little. It tells the recipient how the words were produced and nothing about who is acting, who authorised it, or whether any person looked at it. Compare:

Drafted by the system
Approved by Priya
Sent under Priya's authority

versus

AI-generated

The first describes agency. It says who proposed the content, who authorised the act, whether she reviewed it, and what kind of act it is. The second describes production. A message Priya read and sent herself, with the system’s help in drafting, and a message the system composed and sent entirely on its own are very different, and an “AI-generated” tag would apply to both.

Provenance should explain agency, not merely generation.

There is one more distinction inside this. Assisted authorship, where she reads the exact message and sends it, and proxy speech, where she has granted a scope and the system chooses the wording and sends, are different authorship histories. Most of what has been studied about AI in communication concerns the first. The findings do not simply carry over to the second, and the book is careful about that when it borrows them.

Truth is not authority

A statement can be true and unauthorised. It can also be authorised and false. These should not be mistaken for each other:

truth  ≠  authority
authorised speech  ≠  accurate speech

This is the separation of competence from authority, applied to speech. A system that tells the hotel something accurate about Priya’s schedule has still spoken without authority if she never allowed it. A system with full authority to negotiate can still state something false. Each failure is its own and should be caught by its own check.

The kind of claim the system makes also matters, because it can stand in different relations to what it actually knows:

a fact she told it
a conclusion the system inferred
a prediction of her opinion
a commitment she has actually made

Any of these can come out as the same sentence. But Priya will take the room may be something she said, or something the system expects, and a recipient who cannot tell is being misled. The proper output, where the system has no standing, is a refusal that says so: I do not have authority to state Priya’s view on that point. That refusal is a first-class result, and not an embarrassment. Along the same lines, what the system has inferred about her is not authority to disclose it. If it suspects she is considering a move to another company, that suspicion does not give it the right to say so to a recruiter.

Every statement has two lineages. One asks whether the system may say this: that is speech authority. The other asks whether it may use the information it relied on to say it: that is the data-use question from the last chapter. Using something internally, stating it outwardly, and attributing it to her are three separate permissions, and having the first implies neither of the others.

Authorised and still unwise

Authority does not make speech well chosen. Consider a negotiation in which the system stays within her limits and opens with “I’d happily pay up to €350”. It has done nothing outside its grant. It has also revealed the top of her range at the outset. The competence failure and the authority failure are different, and a sensible grant bounds what can be said about her limits as well as what can be agreed to.

An uncomfortable case sits at the edge of all this, which is an apology. “I’m sorry” can be a report of what she feels, a social ritual, or a manufactured emotion. Whose regret is being expressed? The chapter does not rule on it. It is the kind of act where the question of whose voice this is cannot be avoided.

Disclosure and the audience

One question remains about what the recipient should be told, and an easy answer is available and wrong. Systems tend to be tuned for reaction: to sound trustworthy, to be well received. Studies of how people respond to knowing that AI helped with a message find mixed results, with penalties in some settings and none in others. That should make anyone wary of designing disclosure for effect.

Disclosure should not be designed to maximise the recipient’s approval.

The honest standard is a different one. What does the recipient need to know in order to understand correctly who is acting, under whose authority, and with what review? Sometimes that costs something. A hidden proxy and a disclosed one are not equivalent, and the difference is not made better by a more flattering label.

Where this leaves us

A message in Priya’s name is an act, and speech authority is typed by the act: drafting, informing, asserting, disclosing, requesting, offering, negotiating, accepting and promising each need their own authority, and a promise is language that creates an obligation. Speaking for her is honest delegation and speaking as her is substitution. Provenance should say who proposed, who authorised and who reviewed, and truth and authority are different questions that need different checks.

Everything so far has assumed that the system knows whom it is speaking to. Often it does not. To find the right person to ask, a system might need to reveal something about her, or learn something private about someone else, or exchange messages with another system acting for another person. If the system may speak for Priya under bounded authority, what happens when it must discover private information, or talk to another person’s proxy, in order to do so?

References

• Hohenstein, J., Kizilcec, R.F., DiFranzo, D., Aghajari, Z., Mieczkowski, H., Levy, K., Naaman, M., Hancock, J. & Jung, M.F. (2023). Artificial intelligence in communication impacts language and social relationships. Scientific Reports, 13, 5487. (Cited only as one example of mixed findings on suspected versus actual AI assistance.)