As a retired business communicator with some 30 years of experience behind me building websites, blogs and providing the content for them, I had left the Business Communication profession behind and embraced my photography and my Masters degree in Creative Writing & Communication. So, when AI came across my horizon, I was ill-prepared for its importance and its ground-shaking nature.
Most in my former profession are, too. Indeed, most in my former profession thought that no-one needed websites when there were plentiful numbers of fax machines around the world, just as these same professionals and leaders thought social media was a fad. I was one of the first Business Communication consultants to begin preaching the ‘social media is great for business’ gospel in Australia, and soon found myself on world stages presenting to hundreds of people at a time about how revolutionary social media would be for their business and their interactions with their customers and clients. I like to think I can recognise something revolutionary when it comes along.
Now, along comes AI and the same business communication leaders are burying their heads in the sand about AI, hoping it will go away, just like a fad. It won’t. I started giving presentations to fellow Australian business communicators about AI in 2019. My business went broke.
Said James Warrington (2023) in an article for the online version of The Telegraph, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used by the world’s biggest advertising group to produce promotions including a Nike campaign where Serena Williams plays tennis against her past self.
WPP, which owns agencies including Ogilvy, GroupM and Wunderman Thompson, is using AI “really significantly” to automate both creative and production processes, according to chief executive Mark Read.
Just the other day, The Guardian media organisation in the UK reported that AI was already being used to write articles in two major UK outlets (Sweney)
“The launch of ChatGPT certainly captured our industry and indeed every industry’s imagination and I do think the application of AI to business, to the creative process and to all aspects of society is probably going to be much more fundamental than the metaverse,” said Read.
Shel Holtz (Holtz), one of the Business Communication industry thought leaders, said this in a recent blog post:
“Think Beyond Writing
“The wholesale rejection of AI is likely a failure to explore its potential for communicators, who (like teachers and others) seem to be stuck on ChatGPT’s ability to write. For the most part, writing content is not how I have been using ChatGPT. I was inspired by a January 7 Substack article by Jeremy Caplan on other uses to which the tool can be put. For example, he suggests, it can diminish blind spots. “By asking ChatGPT for reasons why something may NOT be the case, or about arguments we haven’t considered,” he writes, “we can counteract our natural biases.”
“To put that to the test, I considered the current return-to-the-office issue. I imagined a CEO asking for an internal communication informing employees that they must come to the office at least three days a week. I prompted ChatGPT with this: In making the case that employees must return to the office at least three days each week, I am arguing that being present in the office is how people serendipitously encounter each other and produce new ideas, that productivity improves when people are working together in the same physical space, and that being in the office keeps people engaged and connected with their own teams and the wider workforce. What might someone who disagrees with me say?
“ChatGPT instantly delivered an answer:
“Someone who disagrees with you might argue that remote work can also foster serendipitous encounters and collaboration, such as through virtual brainstorming sessions, chat platforms, or video conferencing. They might also argue that productivity can be higher in remote work environments, as it allows for more flexible schedules and eliminates commuting time. Additionally, they might suggest that remote work can actually increase engagement and connectedness, as it allows employees to have more autonomy and control over their work environment, leading to higher job satisfaction and motivation. Finally, they might argue that hybrid work models, which offer both remote and in-person options, can provide the best of both worlds by allowing employees to have flexibility while still maintaining important connections with their teams and the wider workforce.
“I’ll be honest: I had not considered the autonomy and control argument, but it struck me immediately, having paid attention to Daniel Pink’s assertion that autonomy is one of the most vital of motivators for employees.”
Revolutionary.
As Ryan Bradley (Bradley) confesses, he secretly uses AI to do some of his corporate writing job, the AI handling the stuff that he hates doing.
“I keep waiting to be found out, and I keep thinking that somehow the copy will reveal itself for what it is. But I haven’t, and it hasn’t, and at this point I don’t think I or it ever will (at least, not until this essay is published). Which has led me to a more interesting question: Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?
“I’ve surprised myself by deciding that, no, I don’t think it matters at all. This in turn has helped clarify precisely what it was about the writing of this paragraph that I hated so much in the first place. I realized that what I was doing wasn’t writing at all, really—it was just generating copy.
“ChatGPT and the Playground are quite good at putting copy together. The results certainly aren’t great, but they’re absolutely good enough, which is exactly as good as most copy needs to be: intelligible but not smart—simply serviceable. These tools require an editor to liven the text up or humanize it a touch. I often find myself adding an em dash here or there—haven’t you noticed? I love em dashes—or switching a sentence around, adjusting tenses, creating action. At one point, early on, I complained to a data-scientist friend who has worked with machine-learning systems that the robot didn’t seem to understand my command to “avoid the passive voice”; he suggested the prompt “no past tense verbs,” which helped but wasn’t quite right either. I sent him more of my prompts. He said they were too suggestive and that I needed to be firmer, more precise, almost mean. “You can’t hurt the robot’s feelings,” he said, “because it doesn’t have any.”
“I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.”
AI has improved a lot since its early days:
As for me, I’m going to use AI to re-write my dreadfully-amateur first novel. As the pundits say, the magic is in the editing process, the re-writing and the honing of words, sentences, paragraphs and ‘feel’.
Bring it on.
Bradley, Ryan. “A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job.” The Atlantic https://apple.news/A7a8Z3YpJRTCpM0e8562Ogg. Accessed 27th February 2023.
Holtz, Shel. “Once Again, This Time with Ai, the Communications Profession Will Be Late to Embrace a Valuable Technology.” https://holtz.com/blog/blog/once-again-this-time-with-ai-the-communications-profession-will-be-late-to-embrace-a-valuable-technology/4990/. Accessed 6th March 2023.
Sweney, Mark. “Mirror and Express Owner Publishes First Articles Written Using Ai.” The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/07/mirror-and-express-owner-publishes-first-articles-written-using-ai. Accessed 8th March 2023.
Warrington, James. “Serena Williams Plays Tennis against Herself as Ai Comes to Advertising.” The Telegraph (UK) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/02/23/serena-williams-plays-tennis-against-ai-comes-advertising/. Accessed 23rd February 2023.