Talked with a tech person this week on Zoom. If she wants to identify herself in whatever conversation results from this post, that’d be great; if not, also fine.
Anyway, she was trying to get me excited about ways that AI could make executive communication a more powerful strategic force for organizations.
How did I respond? Well, on more than one occasion, she said she appreciated my “passion.”
When it was my turn to say polite things, I acknowledged that there might be limitations to my vision about what tech can achieve.
I’m not exactly technology oriented, I acknowledged. I actually told her to look at my office surroundings, on her Zoom screen. A typewriter. Old books. Tons of old work boots, for some reason. Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Hunter S. Thompson to the left of me, Pete Seeger to the right, here I am.
As a human guy and not a tech guy, I told her she was trying to get tech to solve human problems. I compared the notion to getting AI to do marriage counseling. I told her what I told an AI/exec comms proponent last week: That the exec comms problems I worry about—helping institutional leaders connect genuinely and convincingly with other human beings about ideas that matter mutually—don’t lend themselves to tech solutions. They demand human solutions: emotional ingenuity, intellectual insight, subtle social sense.
I further told her that, lest she think I’m resistant to AI because it’s a new idea: Actually, I’m always desperately grasping for new ideas to introduce to veteran speechwriters and exec comms people. I’m always terrified that there are no new ideas under the sun, and one day people will conclude that Murray and his crew have pretty much told us everything they know, and everything we need to know.
I said that the moment I see even one immediately practical and significant application of AI to exec comms, I’ll be that application’s most enthusiastic proponent. I’ll build a conference session around it. Or a whole conference. And I’ll be rich! I helped organize a conference on the Internet in the mid-90s for a publishing company. We expected a couple hundred people. More than a thousand communicators showed up, all terrified of being left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway. (Why? Because our conference brochures read, “Don’t be left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway!”)
I’m not into scaring my customers, I’m into serving them—helping them solve the problems they actually have. And there isn’t an app for that.
Maybe my new friend will develop it.
She and I politely agreed that we see the same future: A world where the human element of exec comms will only further stand apart from other corporate communications—which have always, after all, read like they written by ChatGPT.
And we said we’d stay in touch.
P.S. Studs Terkel, who habitually referred to blogs as “bloogs,” also said he figured that if a hardware store carried hammers and nails, a software store must be stocked with pillows and blankets.
Your passion is palpable, David 😉
I feel confident that most people who enjoy writing (and who are good at it) don’t want A.I. to interfere with the way they carefully calculate their words. I’ve used A.I. tools to do rough drafts (reluctantly…) and I’ve needed to do A LOT of tweaking to simply rid the text of the tell-tale signs that it was A.I.-generated.
Thanks for your comment, Lucy. Yes, I’d rather just write something fine of my own than spend desultory time editing some life into some computer-generated shit.
Writing it myself, I’ll get more enjoyment and a better product in the end … and in just about the same amount of time, for a fast writer like me.
And if you’re not a fast writer? Well, then you must be a GREAT writer. In which case you’d ALSO never make a computer a part of your process.
AI as a substantial aid to real writers has actually lost plausibility in my mind in the couple years I’ve been forced to consider it.
David
As always a joy to read your stuff.
Re: Two things related to the crux of your problem that leaders could not connect genuinely via tech solutions…
1) Even if the AI mind could write with human inspiration, it still would be disingenuous (and incongruous) to advise a leader to employ it to tell a story or express sentiment…In others the issue is not whether it writes well or not, it’s using it as a writing device regardless of output… Assume so?
2) We’re talking about writing above. What about research? That is an area I find AI to be a promising time saving for tool. Ie. Validate an opinion with credible research or develop a topline understanding of an issue.
Sjh
Thanks, Stephen, always good to hear from you.
2) “Validating an opinion with credible research” sounds like intellectual backfilling. Topline understanding of an issue sounds more legit.
How’s this for an immediate and practical application to exec comms?
https://www.exec-comms.com/blog/2024/02/01/the-a-i-speechwriter-tools-of-the-trade/
Not very good, Ian. Not very good at all.
I’m in an interesting spot, as an exec comms professional working in tech world. At the moment, I am firmly with you: it takes far more time to edit genAI content into something usable than it would be to just write something myself. That said, capabilities are growing. I do wonder if, for instance, genAI tools will soon be able to replace some of the work that agencies do for our team. I don’t have to look far off to see a world where ChatGPT can do just as good a job as the 22-year-old agency employee who also doesn’t really ‘get’ my CEO and his voice, and in far less time (and for less money).
That’s a good point, Carolyn. That’s exactly what I see ChatGPT as: a callow 22-year-old agency employee. Not that fond of either of ’em!