AI and the Rudderless Ship

Why Humans Still Hold the Helm

As I sift through yet another contract I am amazed at how someone can put something out that feels so disjointed. It reads like a jigsaw puzzle of cut and paste, and I wonder whether this was written by multiple people, with no one taking ownership of the overall document. More likely, an AI like ChatGPT has generated this and some overburdened manager has taken a quick look, thought "good enough" and chucked it out the door. More and more these days I see evidence of AI-influenced content in everything from online articles to business contracts.

I get it - some of these outputs are not what anyone dreams of writing, especially on a Friday afternoon when the weekend is calling. It's very tempting to pull up your handy large language model and get it to do the hard work for you. If there are several hands in the pot, it gets rapidly worse as everyone iterates and reiterates on the same shaky foundations. These documents quickly become dense forests of meaningless repetitive text that convey very little. It’s an exercise in patience to wade through paragraphs that seem to dance around a point without ever landing on it, or worse yet, where there’s no real point to be made.

In my mind, AI is like the engine of a ship. It adds tremendous power, enabling capabilities we could barely dream of before. But just like a ship’s engine, without a skilled pilot at the helm, the vessel is doomed to draw aimless circles on the open ocean.

The Perils of Unchecked AI Output

Relying too heavily on AI can lead to significant issues, namely:

• Large Holes in Output: AI can miss critical nuances, leaving gaps that a human expert would naturally fill. Check everything.
• Poor focus: AI often struggles with maintaining a coherent structure, leading to disjointed and confusing documents.
• Quantity over quality: AI has a tendency to pad content with fluff, diluting the message and frustrating the reader.

Too easily do we remove ourselves from the equation - humans are brilliant, creative minds that make connections not always obvious to machine intelligence. We need to celebrate that and move our focus there, rather than make us just AI operators. There’s a meme making the rounds recently that captures this sentiment perfectly: "We are automating the arts so we can focus on the plumbing."

I watched a recent talk on the risk of multitasking. As we spend our days switching between activities, we lose the ability to ponder, to cogitate. Rather than making the most of our innovative associations, we become processors and functional operators - and if there’s a genuine risk of being replaced by machines, it's there as it misses the fundamental value and joy of what being human means.

We are natural problem solvers.

Despite these pitfalls, humans are inherently adept problem solvers. Bill Gates once famously said, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." This adage takes on a new slant in the age of AI: a lazy person will automate the hard, dull parts so they can focus on where they add real value.

Tips for Effective AI Collaboration

To navigate the seas of AI-generated content effectively, consider these key strategies:

1. Know Your Destination: Before you start, have a clear vision of what good looks like. Don’t allow the process to meander; keep the end goal in sight. Start by bullet-pointing out where you are going and the steps along the way.
2. Take Thoughtful Ownership: If you’re unsure of your goal, use AI to brainstorm and flesh out ideas. However, the ultimate responsibility for quality and coherence lies with you. AI is incredible in terms of alleviating writer's block, as long as you don’t delegate complete content ownership.
3. Focus on the ‘How’: Consider the structure as much as the content. Contracts need a clear framework and structure to be a useful tool, briefs to suppliers must highlight your business priorities, as well as how you got to the point of the project, and stories should engage the reader. Define this structure up front and revisit it as you create.
4. Conciseness Over Filler: Short, focused, and concise content always trumps verbose and filler-laden text. AI is amazing at generating the latter, but someone has to ultimately want to read it. If it doesn’t make a clear point, then it should be removed.

Obvious Danger Zones

There are some clear candidates for AI efficiencies and there are definite gains to be made here - but there’s also some significant risks. I see every large business consultancy desperately trying to force AI into every aspect of their organisation - with the aim of staying relevant, and getting a step up on the competition. Even clients are getting in on the action. It is, unfortunately, all too easy to spot when people get it wrong.

Content Creation

Volume content creation is very tempting to use AI for - particularly when it comes to marketing campaigns. After all, there's a considerable number of regular posts to be made and volumes of text are one thing that AI is great at. However, people don’t buy from machines, they buy from people. You typically engage with a brand, or a product, because they find a way to engage you, to create a level of desire for a product in you that makes you want to part with your cash. Machine-generated content fails to achieve that human connection and can be spotted a mile off

Customer Service

I’m genuinely surprised we haven’t learned the lesson from automated answering machines here. If, like me, you typically give them about 10-20 seconds before you’re looking for a way to bypass them and get to speak to a person, then you’ll likely have seen the same issue with online chatbots and automated customer service responses. I may be just old and prefer talking to people than to machines, but I don’t think so. I always feel like I’m having to work too hard, with something very slow, to get to where I need to be. Human Call Centre Operators are typically much more efficient and intelligent, and I applaud them for doing a job that I could in no way do.

Both of these points fall into “representing your brand to your customer” - I am surprised at how many companies are prepared to risk that perception, in favour of saving a relatively small amount of money. Your brand (and your product) is everything. Without this, you have no sales, and no company. Augment and amplify, not replace are the watchwords here.

Analysis

One area which AI excels is that of analysis. Be that data analysis where large volumes of data can be quickly consumed, and conclusions drawn far faster than is possible through human consumption, or - in terms of text analysis - where summaries can be drawn from video and voice transcripts, from parsing large volumes of text for the key bullet points, be they voice and video transcripts of important meetings, contracts or briefing documents.

The danger here is one of hallucination and errors in understanding. The safety net is cross-checking with human sampling and comparison to other related sources of information. Anything coming out of AI needs to be double-checked particularly for conclusions which will form the basis of strategic decisions going forward.

In each of these examples it is clear that the role of the human owner is of paramount importance. With great power comes great responsibility and also great risk. AI enables us to move much faster than ever before, but that also means potentially getting to the wrong place. Fail fast is certainly a good thing, but only if you’re aware that you are failing.

Charting a New Course

As we continue to integrate AI into our daily workflows, it's essential to remember that the technology is here to augment, not replace, human capabilities. You weren’t hired for your ability to cut and paste into an AI tool, but for your excellent mind and how you approach problems. By acknowledging and leveraging our unique strengths, we can amplify our impact and increase the powerful way we all engage with other people successfully.

In this era of rapid technological advancement, our ability to adapt and leverage AI will determine our success. By maintaining a clear vision, taking ownership, and focusing on quality over quantity, we can harness the true potential of these exciting tools.

Keep in mind the ship analogy - by using tools like ChatGPT, CoPilot, MidJourney etc we are putting more powerful engines under the hull. These engines allow us to go further and faster than ever before. While the engine provides the power though, it's the human pilot who sets the course, and ensures the ship gets to where it needs to go. So, keep your hand on the wheel, and your eyes on the horizon, and navigate the vast ocean of possibilities with both human ingenuity and AI's prowess.