A snozzberry that tastes like AI
About a decade ago, when I first made the transition from journalism to content marketing, I was told by my boss: “I mean, no offense, but I often tell people anyone can write.” I replied: “I agree, in the Ratatouille sense that even a rat can cook.” He was not happy with my response, but, crucially, could not articulate why.
In the era of Generative AI, I think about this exchange a lot. Every single day, I work with executives who think that ChatGPT will make writers and other creatives obsolete. And every single day, they are proven wrong. It’s because they are not writers that they think this. It’s because to be a writer is to know the difference between “anyone can cook” and “not everyone can cook well.” It’s because the only ideas they express as part of their jobs are ones they often repeat, as my boss did. And so they can’t fathom the writer’s instinct, which is to think things through from base principles, then craft and express new ideas… something that is Generative AI is fundamentally incapable of doing.
Most accurately described, current generative AI models are bullshit-as-a-service. Ask ChatGPT to give you, say, a 12-page script for an off-brand Willy Wonka interactive experience for kids. If you then lazily skim it, it sure looks like an acceptable bit of writing that nails the flavor and parameters of the request. But to attempt to execute it is to instantly discover the bullshit. That’s when you discover you have a disaster on your hands, filled to the brim with masked, malevolent gimps hiding in walls and children-gobbling-up-grandpa’s-cum jokes. It’s a machine-generated fever dream turned PR nightmare.
When it comes to AI, companies are slowly finding themselves in the “find out” part of the fucking about cycle. Air Canada for example, was just forced by courts to honor a refund policy made up by an AI out of whole cloth. Google–after launching full-throatedly into the AI game, and pushing for generative AI results at the top of every search page–is now devaluing AI content in its SEO results. Expect these stories to only intensify as more poorly thought-out AI projects bounce off the bottom they were racing towards.
Any person who cares deeply about expression will tell you that the actual execution is only 20% of the work. The other 80% falls in the category of the ineffable: not just in the honing of a piece of creative expression (as opposed to its rote creation), but the thinking through of it all. That’s the part that can’t be bullshitted away. “Thinking something through”–whether it’s a piece of writing, a piece of art, a refund policy, or how to execute a knock-off Willy Wonka experience–is something generative AI can’t do. Because what generative AI does do isn’t really all that different than hooking up a statistical probability calculator to a tin of Magnetic Poetry.
This is why AI-written content appeals so much to a certain portion of the C-Suite, whom already are used to communicating almost exclusively in a memetic grammar of pieced together corporate jargon. But for people like me, whom have spent the better part of their professional careers laboriously coaching companies, brands, and especially their executives on the rudiments of how to sound authentically human and how to express new ideas, the notion that AI is going to steal my job is about as plausible as a rat winning the James Beard award.