This began as an intention to comment on somebody else's LinkedIn post. I don’t recall who it was – then LinkedIn refreshed and I lost it forever. Here's what I was going to say to that post about the "problem" of AI-generated writing (expanded a bit since it's no longer a comment).
The premise of my comment was going to be that I’m not entirely sure there’s a problem – at least not a new problem.
The internet: mired in slop since ‘95
What I’ve been considering lately is that people underestimate the vast amounts of "human-generated slop" that already existed prior to generative AI. Ever read a corporate white paper from 2018? If you haven't, let me know. I wrote some of them.
In fact, I believe this could be a classic case of "I learned it from watching you, dad!"
As good as generative AI has gotten, it's still in the business of generating output based on the next most probable token. What’s that mean? It was trained on all the stuff we wrote over the past 30+ years of digital content and copy. Generative artificial intelligence is giving us what it thinks we want based on what it "knows" and "understands" about what we’ve given it.
Mean machines
Are you an amazing writer? Generative AI just might pull your writing down to the mean. Are you a terrible writer? Generative AI could bring your writing up to the mean. Of course there are prompts and custom instructions you can add to AI apps that will kick the quality of generated text up a notch, "Emeril Lagasse style". In the end though, it's still using probability and prediction.
As someone in the profession of corporate writing for a quarter century (yikes), I believe my writing remains above the mean — except when it doesn't.
Sometimes it's the little things
There's stuff that generative AI does that helps me immensely. It's great with structure, flow, headings: things that I *can* do when I am mindful. More often than not, my mind is elsewhere. That's part of the human element where AI may have the clear advantage.
But here's what I find interesting: the way I work with AI on early drafting of content has helped train my brain to focus more on those little details — the things around the edges of the work I do that sometimes get overlooked. I feel I've gotten better in some ways because of generative AI support.
This is not the case for AI across the board. There's plenty wrong with it. We take wins where we can.
The best thing that could come out of AI-generated writing is that some of us may look inward, realize we have contributed to the problem, and get better.
The writing for this post came out of my brain without the use of AI. Even the H2s. Em dashes have been used intentionally just to throw you off.
I did use AI for the image. It really liked my Emeril joke, apparently.
