My very young daughter asked her Aunt Susy, “Do you have Snap Chat?”
Susy replied, “Is it time for snacks yet?”
But if the worm is turning against AI, it’s not us deaf and tech-ignorant oldsters rolling it, as much as it is the kids. Or so it seems in my wee corner of the world.
Yes, a dear friend of the Professional Speechwriters Association and a fellow middle-ager Jim Reische, firmly rebutted a sunny white paper we put out on how AI could lead to a golden age of speechwriting.
“Good writing depends on good thinking,” Jim began:
And good thinking comes from doing work that the AI advocates claim is unstrategic: unworthy of our talents and limited, precious (to them and to us, in different measure) time. Work that, in the doing of it, also produces the valuable and sometimes enjoyable byproduct of natural human relations. Doing this supposed scut-work often leads to a conversation with a co-worker who has information we need; a librarian or archivist who can help us with our research; a barista or bus driver on the way to the office. None of which transpires when we outsource the tasks to AI. Once that occurs, it’s just a matter of sitting in our lonely offices crafting prompts, then helping the machines to connect with other machines and present us with their conclusions.
And of course I myself share that basic instinct, though I am obligated to help communicators explore the professional applications of AI at the behest of their bosses and under intense pressure from The Whole World. (We’ve started a working group on the subject and are offering a new and updated version of our very popular AI for Speechwriting & Executive Communication workshop in the spring.)
But I’m more interested in the resistance of young people—the sorts who traditionally drag their elders into the tech future. Now, it seems, many of them feel dragged by us. A normally mild-mannered young Facebook connection recently delivered a violent “shame on you, David Murray” post because I was offering the AI workshop. She loudly lamented what I and my ilk are doing to creative people, and the world’s water supply.
More quietly, I heard through the grapevine that a young participant at the recent PSA World Conference enjoyed the conference but scratched her head at all the AI enthusiasm expressed by the middle-agers on the stage and in the audience. I got in touch with her and she confirmed: “Some of the other younger writers and I had lively conversations at the conference about wanting to do the hard work—leaf through a research paper, call up an expert, stare at a blank page and wait, and wait. I think we don’t want to feel cheated out of the magic of writing.”
And you know what? In my response to Reische’s piece, I remembered feeling the same, when I was her age:
I’m a tech foot-dragger going way back—back to the first years of my career, when I had just learned how to write kickers, heads, subheads, leads and nut graphs to drag readers kicking and screaming into the articles I was writing. And suddenly all these propeller heads were telling me I should put lots of “hyperlinks” into my articles, to give readers portals through which to leave the article, to explore other areas of the endlessly growing World Wide Web.
Ummm, fuck that!
Such bellowing led to comms tech guru Shel Holtz dubbing me, in my twenties, “The World’s Youngest Curmudgeon.”
All to say, as we prepare to eat another year of the future whether we’re hungry for it or not, I understand all of these points of view: the AI optimist, the AI pragmatist, the AI resistor and the AI hater. And I don’t disagree with any of them. Who will seem wiser in two years or five years or 10 or 20? We’ll find out. Until then, I and my colleagues will do our best to give AI adopters the help they ask for—and the others, voice they deserve. The young, especially.
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