During the email exchange last week that we’re rehashing here this week, I asked Mike Long why he cared to tell AI skeptics off even though he thinks we’re all doomed dinosaurs anyway:
First, I comment so little anywhere these days because my actions have caught up with my aspiration: I really have stopped caring to change people’s minds. We are entrenched in a culture that believes “what I feel” somehow changes how reality operates. If people can’t agree on objective reality, they can’t debate. …
For instance, when I wrote below that the purpose of professional comms is to communicate (actually, to effect change by this communication), I was stating a fact. One can argue otherwise forever but it’s still objectively correct at the end of every single day. Yet here’s Tech.EDU, where Queen Reason is alleged to keep an apartment, talking about authenticity and “lived experience”—well, if the purpose of the blogs they offer is to get to know somebody’s daily hot take, then sure, forbid AI—and dictionaries and phone calls. (Hell, let’s forbid people from preparing for job interviews. Authenticity!)
But if the goal of the blog is, like the site it lives on, to give people a favorable impression of Tech.EDU so they might apply, then asking Janet to barf up whatever crosses her mind—with any support she likes but God forbid she use electronic support—is a hill to die on … if your goal is to let Janet rattle.
Then we zip across town to Speech Land: If Jimmy the speechwriter needs info on how a plumber fixes a leak or how an attorney files an objection in a civil trial, AI is a faster and more accurate source than anything else, including asking a plumber or an attorney (who relies not on broad research but on their own experience alone, I must add). Will the plumber or the attorney give you a more colorful, edge-filled answer? Almost always. But that’s not how it was getting done before AI; it’s disingenuous to insist we “go back” to what never was, now.
I could go on and on in other directions but I think the bottom line is this: Writers’ objections to AI (aside from concern about losing their line of work, and that’s a different discussion) are ironic because for all our vaunted claims on first principles, I have not met many (any?) writers who begin this inquiry from the ultimate first principle: We write professionally so others will understand, be persuaded, and act. AI helps us do that. If we write so someone can get to know us—a fine thing, that—then you can make the anti-AI case, though it’ll be hard to do it without indicting thesauruses and experts, too.
In the pro comms world, the people who read or hear what we write would not have wondered how we wrote it (did they use AI?) unless someone prompted them to ask—this is curiosity masquerading as ethics. They have no legitimate interest in how we did it any more than I care how the electrician wires my house or the therapist fixes my outlook.
I replied:
I disagree with your entire premise—the FACT you cite—about the purpose of most professional communication.
The motto of my company is, “Professional leadership communication to promote greater social understanding.”
Except for pure marketing and sales writing, that’s what most corporate communication is—and certainly it’s what most leadership communication is.
Generally, CEOs and university presidents don’t give speeches or write blog posts to get people to do stuff “with their arms and legs,” as you colorfully put it in your speechwriting teaching.
They give speeches mostly so that customers, employees and relevant other members of the public understand what kind of people they are. They do this by getting across the various ways they personally are brilliant, relatable, charming and magnetic. [And, I should have added in the hot moment, but didn’t, something like: “And by articulating their point of view and purpose, as they want the world to know it.”]
That is what we do for a living. When we say we’re trying to change behavior, that’s to hornswoggle the Board of Regents to spring for a new speechwriter. But Janet IS trying to give people a favorable impression of Tech.EDU so they might apply (even if they would otherwise be intimidated by the terrifying, cold image we all have of that place).
I think you know all that, and I think your basing you whole argument on it is disingenuous. And anyway, I’m not the Board of Regents.
In your teaching about communication, you talk a lot about how people come to their opinions by how they feel, and then they backfill with evidence and argument, to justify.
You seem to exempt yourself from that bovine approach.
I think your argument here is one of the most powerful examples I’ve seen of it.
Look, Mike. I believe you love to use AI. When you talk about it it’s like you’re telling me about a new friend. Where has he been all your life?!?
But just because you love him doesn’t mean Janet at Tech.EDU—or David Murray, at Writing Boots—would be better off using him in their daily work … or even that we ought to love him too.
And finally. I’ve heard AI enthusiasm from you and many other communicators for long enough now that I’m about to ask for receipts. You say it makes you far more productive and gets you more clients.
Where’s the yacht?
You say it makes you more creative and your writing richer and better.
Where’s The Great Gatsby?
Maybe it’s coming.
But until it comes, you know what to do with your tech stack.
Join us for tomorrow’s exciting conclusion, where Mike brings Hannibal Lecter into this.
