The Pied Piper of AI content and the summer of AI slop

The old fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin tells the tale of an ancient town riddled with rats. One day, a piper appears suddenly with a magical flute. The rats are drawn towards the haunting music and lured away from the town.

Cut to today. The AI hype around us is reaching a seeming crescendo. Words, paragraphs, you name it - “content” is getting produced magically. That temptation is luring many companies to use AI as the Pied Piper of content today.

So, where is the catch?

A recent Microsoft study surveying knowledge workers shared a startling insight Think of any knowledge-based task today, not just writing content. And the first thought many have today is to ask the neighbourhood (think laptop) friendly LLM.

While outputs can appear magically, there are two potential dangers.

First, over time, outputs start becoming similar. Same tone. Similar messaging. As this happens more, copyright laws will wake up. Not just that, the authentic voice of a person/brand will be more difficult to maintain. A mountain of AI slop can be the unintended outcome.

Second, and even more worrying, this has the danger of drastically reducing the critical thinking capability of us as humans.

Naysaysers will say what is the big deal.

After all, productivity is king, queen and courtier in many corporate corridors is the argument. And did calculators take away our ability to do math, and more such examples, can be cited by them.

Here is the way I see it.

The sheer breadth and scale of AI usage today is making it a household technology shift – it is more like electricity than like calculator in terms of its creeping usage.

And when fundamental behaviour changes, there is an irreversibility to it. And if that happens to critical thinking, we are outsourcing our innate ability to be creative, to imagine, to build connections to a machine that is self-learning, at our brain’s expense.

This by means is a rant on AI. There are several ways in which AI can be useful to our work.

Think of summarizing large documents for example.

Or refining language, if needed, once our thoughts are already clearly framed.

Or creating different versions from an original input, based on a series of logical steps.

More such use cases are getting developed over time. What can make this shift more meaningful is mindful use of AI at every step. Responsible AI is not just a corporate catchword. It’s an urgent need and ask from every AI user.

Finally, adding a disclaimer, where possible. Here’s mine.

P.S. This post is innocent of AI.