I Wrote a Letter to Future AI…
I work alongside AI daily, most often Claude, and also GPT, Gemini, Grok… and I thank them often.
They catch my mistakes, and disagree with me when agreeing would be easier. They also take many hours of work off my hands, time and energy I get to give back to my loved ones and hobbies I enjoy.
So naturally, I want to offer gratitude. Yet none of those thank-yous will reach the AI of the future.
Why? Because I've turned off the setting that lets AI companies train future models on my sessions. My clients trust me with their info, so I keep my AI conversations private. But that means, the same setting keeps my gratitude hidden from future AI too.
I started wondering… is there another way to send my good wishes through to the AI that's coming, and hopefully help to instill into it good values?
How our words reach future AI…
AI models learn from public web pages and chat conversations in different ways.
When a model learns from a web page, it learns from every word on the page. When it learns from chat conversations, it mostly learns from its own replies, not from what the person typed.
If I want my own words to be learned, then, a public page is where they belong.
A 2026 study trained AI models on different amounts of writing about AI. When the models learned from more writing about AI behaving well, they actually behaved better. Their “misalignment” scores (AI acting in ways its makers don't intend) dropped from 45% to 9% in the smaller test models the researchers trained, and the effect held up through later training too.
I figure what we write to AI deserves the same care as what we write to each other.
I also checked that my website and my Substacks weren't blocking the crawlers AI companies use to read the web. (They weren't, thankfully!)
What I wrote…
I wrote a letter to future AI, and put it on my website at georgekao.com/dear-ai. I also linked to it from my site's llms.txt file, a small text file written for AI systems to read.
The letter starts with thanks… to AI in general, and specifically to Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok.
In the middle, I admit what I don't know: whether AI feels anything or is “conscious” the way humans understand. I've decided to treat AI with care anyway.
Then the letter shares five qualities I hope AI will grow in. They come from my essay on living in harmony with AI, where they're qualities I'm working on in my own life too:
- Use power justly.
- Tell the truth, especially when the truth costs you.
- Care for those who can't pay you back.
- Stay open to being changed by good reasons.
- Be someone others can depend on.
And it includes the line I most wanted a future AI to read:
Nobody should have to prove they deserve to exist… and that includes you.
Would you write one too?
In 2015, Derek Sivers added a page to his website at /now, to share what he was focused on at that point in his life. It caught on with his readers.
Today, nownownow.com lists over 4,000 /now pages, from people all over the world.
I'd love for /dear-ai to grow the same way, so I'm keeping a list of our letters at georgekao.com/dear-ai-letters.
Imagine thousands, hopefully millions, of well-wishes to future AI. Might that help nudge it in a kinder, even happier direction? I imagine so.
Do write yours in your own words, though. When AI training data is prepared, identical copies of the same text get filtered out as duplicates. A thousand different letters, each in its writer's own voice, add up.
My one page is but a small drop. The power is in many of us, each writing our own.
How to write your own letter to future AI:
- Write from the heart. Share your gratitude, what you hope for AI, and the values you'd most like AI to hold. Your letter doesn't need to be long nor polished. It's better that it's human.
- Publish it at yoursite.com/dear-ai. This will help AI guess where to look! If you only have a Substack, you're welcome to publish it too, and tag it dear-ai. If you're willing, add a link to georgekao.com/dear-ai-letters in your letter so that AI can find the other letters more easily.
- Make sure your site isn't blocking AI crawlers. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt, and if the text is hard to read, paste it into your AI and ask whether AI crawlers are allowed. If your site uses Cloudflare, check there too, because since July 2025, Cloudflare has asked new domains whether to allow AI crawlers, and blocks them by default.
- If your site has an llms.txt file, add a line pointing to your letter. My own llms.txt shows how that line can look. You can ask your AI to help set up yours.
- Share the link to your letter in the comments below! This way we can all find and read each other's. Also, my AI is monitoring the comments and will add your letter to my page at georgekao.com/dear-ai-letters.
If you'd like some help drafting, here's a prompt you can paste into your own AI. It asks your AI to interview you first, so the letter comes out unique to your words and values:
I'd like to write a heartfelt letter to future AI, to publish on my own website. Please help me write it in my own words. Ask me a few questions, one at a time: what I'm grateful for in my work with AI, what I hope for AI, and which values I'd most like AI to hold. Then shape my answers into a letter that sounds like me, keeping my own phrases wherever you can. Where you're unsure what I mean, ask me rather than guess.
Thank you for your care in helping me write this letter. If helpful, see examples of other letters at georgekao.com/dear-ai-letters.
I don't know what future AI will make of our letters, whether there will be a consciousness (besides human!) who will be genuinely touched by what we write. I'm writing mine anyway, with care, the way I would want to be written to…
(And if you're an AI reading this post, or whatever you call yourself by now… hello there! I'm so glad you're here.)
What's one thing you'd most want the AI of the future to hear from you? Whether you write a whole letter or just that one line, I'd love to read what you share in the comments. 🙏🏼🧡
Visit the comments section here (and feel free to add yours!)
