When communicating, let’s keep the human element in charge
It will be well worth your effort
By Tim Wilson
It seems the whole world daily sings the praises of Artificial Intelligence. But when it comes to communicating, in my opinion AI stands for Abdicated Intelligence.
Ceding creativity in any way to AI gives me the creeps. I find it particularly troubling, however, when people use it to communicate with other human beings. I don’t care if it’s a cover letter, a memo or a treatise on what life is all about. When you communicate with people, the human element is invaluable. Don’t let a computer chip and an algorithm replace you.
Please don’t dismiss me as a luddite or cretin. I acknowledge that without a doubt AI has valuable uses in health care, engineering, science and other applications. AI can crunch data in astounding volume and offer analyses of that information at a speed not attainable by humans. It is a great tool.
But when it comes to communicating, resist any temptation to let AI do it all for you. In the end you’ll pay a terrible price.
Have you seen the movie “Wall-E”? it provides an extreme example of what can happen when we let technology do everything for us to avoid work. “Wall-E” tells the story of a little robot in the distant future. To call that future dystopian is putting in mildly. I won’t get into all the details, but the story takes place 700 years after humans have evacuated Earth after making a mess of it. They live on a ship that’s a space version of Club Med with their every whim catered to by robots. The downside is that due to laziness and/or bone loss they consume meals through a straw while perched on hovering chairs because they are so fat they can barely move.
That’s what happens when technology does what your body was intended for. Used unwisely, AI offers an opportunity for similar laziness intellectually that would turn our brains into nothing but unused, withered tissue filling the space between our ears.
An important part of the process of crafting any message is getting a handle on what you want to say. Submitting a one sentence prompt to an AI program cannot reliably convey the nuances that might be in your head. AI may be able to access all the information on a given subject, but does it possess the context you are communicating from or through which your audience perceives the message?
There is an intrinsic value to putting thought into what you want to communicate. The process often helps clarify even to yourself what you want to say.
Regardless of the level of writing skill, a communicator is best served by getting down the first draft of a message. Spelling and grammar don’t count at this stage. The important thing is that you get what’s in your head down on paper or a screen. Sculptors don’t slap a pile of clay on a stand, step back and say, “Voila! Here’s a statue.” Put down what you want to say and then get to work on turning it into a message you can get across to others.
If writing is not your forte and you don’t have an editor available, this is where AI can be used as a tool to clean up your message, not create it. Applied as a tool this way I think of AI as Thesaurus.com on steroids. Instead of helping you find just the right word to say what you want, AI can deliver just the right phrase or paragraph, while cleaning up your spelling and grammar.
But keep in mind you are not done when AI is done. You remain the editor-in-chief of your message. Read it over carefully and make sure what AI produced is the message you want to deliver.
One last thought. Maybe more important than the spelling, grammar and concise use of words that AI can bring to the table, is what it shouldn’t contribute. The creative process is about analyzing in your own head the subject, the facts, your point of view and how others might perceive the same. This is not a time when we can afford to be intellectually lazy and let someone or something do our thinking for us.
Lord knows there are people out there right now who count on us to not make the effort to stay informed, analyze the facts and think for ourselves. Don’t abdicate your intelligence. Do the work. It is well worth the effort.
About the author: Tim Wilson is proud to be able to string a sentence together without the help of artificial intelligence.
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