Prominent Professional Speechwriters Association member Felcity Barber—whose new weekly speechwriting newsletter you should subscribe to—asked her techie husband if he thought her job might be taken by AI.
My job is safe for now and my husband was able to explain why. AI tools are only as good as what’s already out there on the internet. I often write about niche topics that are not widely explored online. If there’s not that much that’s publicly available AI won’t generate anything useful. And if the leader you’re writing for doesn’t have much content publicly available, AI can’t replicate their tone of voice. Furthermore, AI can only look back at what you’ve said about a topic previously. It can help with ideation, but it can’t come up with a new perspective. “It can be a thought partner, but it can’t be a thought leader,” were my husband’s words.
Chinese speechwriters, however, toil in a notoriously cliché- and idiom-addicted cultural tradition. Chinese presidents and premiers remind me of a government tour guide I had there 15 years ago, who spoke strictly in starchy idioms: He discouraged us from attending a local theater performance in Lijiang, which he compared to “a wet blanket on a long-suffering yak.” He compared a worrier in our group to “an ant on a hot stove.” He referred to his wife as “my better half,” his 93-year-old grandmother as “no spring chicken,” the local police as “stuffed shirts.” He called the disastrous and deadly summer flooding in China as “par for the course” and hotel prices “highway robbery” (because “you pay through the nose”). When he bid us farewell in the evening, he advised us to, “Sleep tight. Do not let bed bugs bite!”
That’s pretty much how Chinese political speeches sound. Check out these passages from a speech delivered by Chinese Premiere Li Qiang at the opening plenary of a World Economic Forum conference in Tianjin, China, last month:
Second, having experienced the shocks of global crises, we should all the more cherish solidarity and cooperation. The history of human society is a record of human battles against and victories over challenges and difficulties. In face of a momentous crisis, no country can stay unscathed, or solve problems single-handedly. Solidarity and cooperation is the right way forward. …
As a community with a shared future, we must cherish the gains of our cooperation, embrace the concept of win-win cooperation, and work together to tackle these global challenges and promote human progress. …
Third, having experienced the ups and downs of economic globalization, we should all the more cherish openness and sharing.
Without peace, nothing can be achieved. This is a hard lesson humanity has learned from history.
Let us be united in our wish for win-win cooperation, paddle together with one heart and one mind, and steer the giant ship of the world economy toward a brighter future!
Great Scott, is that brutal. Not only could AI create that—AI could beat it.
Which gets me back to the point I made about six months ago in Fortune: ChatGPT will write speeches for leaders who don’t care to communicate original ideas with an audience, but only want to get up and say the expected thing. And we’re about to find out just what percentage of leaders that is—foreign, and domestic.
Except that really is what they want to say. They don’t care prize JFK/MLK soaring heights of rhetoric. I say again, this really is what they want to say.
Respectfully disagree: https://www.exec-comms.com/blog/2023/07/01/the-a-i-speechwriter-part-3/
Ian, also respectfully—reading your analysis drains my heart’s blood out of my body so fast that I worried I might go into hypovolemic shock by paragraph three. Anyone who thinks this way at the beginning, the middle or even the end of composing an actual speech is guaranteed to write a speech only a bureaucrat could love … but that no one in the audience will tolerate, without going on their phones to scratch out their suicide notes.
This is like reading a 10-page manual about how to blow your nose. Correct in every step, utterly missing the human spirit of the thing.
I may be wrong about all of this. And you’ll be the first to know. If within five or 10 years people are composing or even heavily editing speeches using the means you suggest here, you’ll see a news release from Pro Rhetoric, LLC about how CEO David Murray resigned to spend more time with his family.
And THAT will be written by ChatGPT.
I agree, Stewart. But it is exactly nothing. It is the equivalent of standing at the lectern with arms crossed, and smiling. It is the equivalent of saying, “Do you think I’m going to tell you what’s actually on my/our mind? Motherfucker, please.” And so AI could write it. In fact, a 1978 Texas Instruments calculator could write it. That’s all I was saying.