Writing Boots

When we kids skinned a knee or jammed a finger, Dad would ascertain that we were not immediately dying and then insist, “Oh, you’re fine,” and go on washing the car.

Similarly, a lot of CEOs have been trying to calm our upset about AI lately. On Monday in the Executive Communication Report (a newsletter I write that you would be crazy not to subscribe to because it is both useful and free), this item:

In the interest of space, I didn’t include this added morsel from the CNN piece:

“The pace of adoption of this technology is going a little bit faster. As businesses wrestle with deploying the technology and the automation, the short-term disruption might be a little bit higher” [than the Industrial Revolution?!] the Goldman Sachs CEO said. “But our economy is incredibly broad and nimble.”

Wait, what does this guy think the rest of us lie awake worrying about? Civilization coming to an end? The end of history? No, money boy! Those are academic matters, top of mind only to chin-strokers who have gazillions of dollars in their doomsday vault. I bet you folks also think a lot about the sun going out, in another five billion years. I probably would, if I were you. We all need something to fear, besides fear itself.

We short-term thinkers? We paycheck piggies? We’re down here fretting about losing our actual jobs and our actual way of life—kinda like millions did in all those other “floods” of technologies of which you so blithely speak. More profoundly than that, we’re worried about our children not having a future that connects in any way with what they’ve been raised to expect—during the generation or three that our “broad and nimble” economy might take to absorb “the short-term disruption.”

Luckily, we working people have tools for coping with our existential dread. Passed down in our cultural DNA through centuries of economic and social upheaval and disease and war, our coping skills include: Rearranging deck chairs. Faith in God, in one another and in ourselves. Denial. Netflix. Sports, and other forms of violence. Drugs and alcohol. And so on and so forth. These tools vary in their effectiveness, but all of them work better than reassuring quotes from rich guys about how nimble the fucking economy is.

Believe me.

Flight delayed, so sitting at Old Ebbitt Grill trying to get some post-PSA World Conference thoughts down while I still have them …

Conferences are incoherent people-frenzies in the first place, and as a harried conference organizer, you don’t have time to hook together the ideas you hear or the feelings you have. So this’ll come up in undigested chunks.

It’s a shame but it’s true: You can no longer hold a conference in America on professional or public rhetoric with full-throated participants from across the political spectrum. It’s been going this way for years—at least since Trump I. (Maybe conservative speechwriters would say since Obama.) I’ve felt bad about it, like it comes from a lack of tolerance or openness in me, the convener.

But this year, we had a keynote panel on what corporate, political and university speechwriters should do to make more effective, constructive rhetoric. And we had a second-day session on how speechwriters are contending with a political environment that challenges the relevance and threatens the existence of the institutions for whose leaders they are employed to communicate.

And I realized the issue isn’t a lack of tolerance for the opposing point of view. It’s a lack of time.

Including at this conference speakers (and full-throated participants) who disagree, for instance, with the premise that the Trump administration is an ill wind, would be like holding a symposium for climatologists that questioned whether hurricanes were a bad thing, after all. Surely the argument would be stimulating, but it would consume time and energy already in precious supply among all these people and over two or three short days.

I have been organizing speechwriting conferences for three decades, and I do miss the days when the arch-conservative speechwriter for the CEO of Exxon could break bread with the speechwriting treehugger at Greenpeace and exchange droll anecdotes about the joys and aggravations of the speechwriting life, even swapping rhetorical tricks in a spirit of apolitical collegiality. But then, I miss a lot of things from American life as I’ve known it.

To be clear: Every speechwriter is welcome at this conference. I just regret to say that, in this moment, some speechwriters (and some views) will certainly feel more welcome than others.

(That was longer and better-digested than the rest will be.)

• Serious speechwriters are essentially, philosophically, not really sanguine about AI. Everyone feels pressure to find ways to seem to be with-it with this stuff, and every time a conference speaker says they’ve found a useful application of AI to our work, everyone leans eagerly forward. But when the speaker offers up the example, everyone sits back in their chairs and exhales in disappointment. Or, in one case, texts the conference organizer angrily. “Using AI to help write termination letters? Jesus Christ on a waffle, what the fuck is wrong with people?”

The PSA is helping speechwriters and other communicators incorporate AI into their work. We do see some legit uses, most at the beginning and the very end of the speechwriting process—subject-matter research at the beginning, and reviewing for holes in arguments, possible linguistic augmentation and unseen audience sensitivities at the end.

But one argument I will never listen to in favor of using AI for writing is, “It frees up time to do more strategic thinking.” No.

As Writing Boots readers know, I make more time to write than you have time to read.

One day a year, I clear the decks, ride my motorcycle to a cafe and sit down to do some serious strategic thinking, in preparation for my company’s annual planning gathering, in Chicago.

God, I hate that cafe day. Sitting there staring dolefully out the window, I feel like the famous writer who quit the business and went into self-exile in another country, so he could discover his inner voice. And realized he had none, and moved back.

In fact, the only reason I’m able to eventually generate the tortured staff memo that sets the tone and agenda for our annual meeting is … all the fucking writing (and forced thinking) I’ve done the 364 days previous!

I wrote early in the AI explosion that getting AI to do your writing isn’t a shortcut, it’s a short circuit. I believe that still. And, possibly suicidally, so do most of the other writers I know, in their hearts. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last,” Churchill said in 1940, without the help of AI, “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” Or ink, as the case may be.

(Those thoughts were also better digested than I expected. Mostly, by their own acid.)

• I’ll conclude with a thought I have yet to turn over sufficiently but want to get on paper anyway. Our closing keynoter, podcaster Phoebe Judge, was asked how she relates to other people sufficiently well to get them to tell her personal things for public consumption. She said she keeps two things in mind, at the same time, about herself: “I’ve been very lucky,” she said. “And I’ve also been very unlucky.”

I’ve known Phoebe since she was 15, and I have an idea how that applies to her life. I have yet to fully inventory how it applies to my own—let alone yours—though I sense it deeply does. I share it here, though, because it knocked me back, even in my conference-organizer’s fog, as something that might be worked over by each one of us.

Because I think it might help us do what Kurt Vonnegut told us to do, in a quote with which I ended these emotional professional proceedings: “Help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

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Conference participants, those are the thoughts that followed me home from D.C. What followed you? Leave your thoughts in the comments (or email them to me if you want anonymity, at david.murray at prorhetoric.com). I’ll incorporate them into a larger wrap-up at ProRhetoric.com.