My company is putting on a seminar this fall, AI for Speechwriting and Executive Communication. It is intended for speechwriters, and communication professionals, who might understand communication well enough to use AI to make it better. It is not for their clients, many of whom think like LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, who recently said he uses AI to communicate with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “Every time, before I send him an email, I hit the Copilot button to make sure that I sound Satya-smart.”

Uh huh.

There is no artificial replacement for a genuinely intelligent, culturally literate person who has devoted a life to human communication. But there might be only one way to prove that: the hard way.

I got some rousing support for that view on a couple Zoom calls this month with speechwriters, each of which contained rousing, even truculent defenses by speechwriters of the primacy of human beings in the leadership communication equation.

My favorite of these was a veritable rant by a normally mild-mannered independent speechwriter, who was approached by a client who had spent three weeks trying to get AI to put together an important internal address at a crucial moment in his organization.

The script looked okay. It sounded all right. But something was wrong with it, the client sensed.

Finally he turned to our speechwriter and asked her if she could maybe figure out what was missing.

Ummm, his story was missing. The whole context of the moment was missing. The strategic purpose of the gathering was missing. The fucking leadership was missing. Because what does ChatGPT know about that?

The speechwriter spoke with the guy for about 10 minutes and ascertained all of the above and worked up the perfect speech to create understanding, reinforce shared values, galvanize the group and set them on their mission, together.

“But what a waste of time!” the speechwriter said in exasperation. “Three weeks, he fooled around with ChatGPT, when he and I could have pulled this message together in a day!”

The old saying went that, to be successful, a writer had to be faster than writers who were better than them, and better than writers who were faster than them.

I love a story that shows writers being both better, and faster, than ChatGPT.

I also hope this speechwriter’s client learned his lesson here.

Unfortunately, I think lots of leaders might have to learn it for themselves—maybe, by doing without speechwriters for awhile and coming back sadder and wiser.

Rather than fearing for their jobs, maybe speechwriters should be looking forward to a short sabbatical—and then a return, with a nice raise.

This post is from 2019. I don’t often write mean shit like this anymore, not even about people who deserve it. There are times to “stir up the animals,” as H.L. Mencken used to put it. But there are times when it seems wrong to inject more poison into the world. But then last week Robert Scoble posted this, to his 235,000 followers on Facebook: “You might hate Elon. You might hate AI. But get over it. I’m over on X because that’s where the AI industry is.” Well, I don’t actually hate Elon, because it’s hard to hate someone whose mind you don’t understand any more than that of a three-toed sloth. And I don’t hate AI, yet, because I don’t use it, yet. I don’t even hate X, because I use it to promote my writing and never read the other posts there. But this Scoble guy … anyway, I posted this six years ago and it rings clear and true to me today. —DM

***

a salesman is an it that stinks to please

but whether to please itself or someone else 

makes no more difference than if it sells 

hate condoms education snakeoil vac 

uumcleaners terror strawberries democ 

ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair

—e.e. cummings

***

There is a professional Silicon Valley salesman named Robert Scoble. I’ve been following him for years, like a responsible dog owner.

You don’t know Scoble? Let me tell you about him.

He made his bones as the “Evangelism Strategist” for Microsoft 15 years ago, and has been working in similar professional-grinner capacities for increasingly foolish-sounding companies since then: Pod Tech, Mansueto Ventures and Futurist. Now he works as the Chief Strategy Officer for a company called Infinite Retina. They’re into something called “spatial computing.”

What Scoble does is, he goes to conferences wearing figurative and literal e-goggles and speaks sanguinely about the latest technology stuff so that his latest patron looks cool by association, in a world that has a peculiar definition of cool. And then he blogs and tweets about it. 

He used to do more than that at these conferences. His alcoholic womanizing—or was it womanizing alcoholism?—was exposed, socially arbitrated and baked into the cake like 15 minutes before the #metoo movement began. Phew!

Now sober and a self-congratulatory-stay-at-home-dad who pimps his autistic kid to flog spatial computing, Scoble blogs at Scobleizer, about things like “self-driving cars, AI, cryptocurrencies, digital assistants and XR,” which he says will “deeply change the world.” His semi-literacy and incoherence are made up for by his enthusiasm, to return to the dog comparison.

Why am I picking on Scoble? Because he has 412,000 Twitter followers, he’s been pissing me off for more than a decade, and I haven’t picked on him enough during that time. [And also because I’m borderline batshit crazy on the subject of technology, as you have read about here before.]

A Scoble Facebook post last week put me over the edge—not because it was especially douchy, but because it was typically so.

Scoble begins:

I went to a VR party at a game developers conference.

Did I play VR? No.

So what did I do? I had some amazing conversations but the one that made it all worth it was with a developer who is working for a trucking company.

First: How many parties have you been to that didn’t include psilocybin mushrooms where you had “amazing conversations” in the quantity of “some”? Robert Scoble has amazing conversations with amazing people at amazing events every week of his amazing life. Sometimes he writes about his personal life, too. His friends are amazing, his wife is amazing and his kids are amazing. You’d be amazed.

Scoble continues, about the amazing developer who works for the trucking company:

He taught me all about the bleeding edge of supply chains. His firm is putting the finishing touches on an automated cold-storage warehouse. Robots do everything including loading the trucks.

Each load has sensors. He says they know an AC unit is failing before the trucker does and before it arrives at its destination.

I was telling my friend Carlos Calva about this while my Tesla drove home. He answered “what will humans do for jobs?”

Why make better video games, for sure.

We then talked about the chaos simulation engine that Unreal Engine showed off today where game designers can destroy buildings in real time using advanced physics engines.

Do you ever feel like you are living in the future?

Scoble went on. I won’t, except to admit that I have a short fuse when it comes to heavy-breathers from Silicon Valley. And that I have a lot of anxiety about our gadget-encrusted present, let alone our virtual future. I think a lot of us feel this anxiety, but vaguely sense that the cultural consequences are the unavoidable collateral results of the best American qualities: scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurialism.

But no. There are full-time sharpers like Scoble involved, selling us this shit.

Such people do have to be watched, and occasionally reprimanded by homely humanists, who would prefer to load trucks for a living.

Postscript:

***

Postscript 6/24/25: With the VR and AR in the revolutions that never happened in the rearview, now it’s AI that Scoble and his ilk are touting. As I will say in my opening remarks at tomorrow’s Executive Communication Summit, I have been hearing bullshit like this my whole life: I was around when the Internet came along, and people with profit motives warned communicators that if they didn’t learn how to use it, they’d be “left behind.” I don’t remember anybody being left behind, who didn’t want to be left behind. AI might be different. But Robert Scoble will always be the same salesman that stinks excuse.

Found on Facebook, source unknown: “‘The Drunk Basket’ was a fascinating and somewhat humorous slice of urban life in 1960s Istanbul. During this time, it was common for bars and taverns to hire individuals—often known locally as ‘küfe carriers’—whose job was to transport heavily intoxicated patrons safely back to their homes. These men would use a large basket (küfe) strapped to their backs, similar to those used for carrying goods, and would literally carry the drunk person through the city streets.”