Don’t fear the reaper or AI

People always ask me about my thoughts on artificial intelligence.

When they learn my focus is on executive communications and content development, they presume I am worried about artificial intelligence taking over for the written word.

I have several thoughts on AI, but I don’t know if I have a formal position. However, because people keep asking me about it, I decided to share a few thoughts here. I will probably expound on them later.

My first thought regarding AI is, what is there to be afraid of? Certainly, from a marketing standpoint, plenty of people will misuse AI. They will use it to create garbage content that won’t benefit anyone, but they’ll have no problem sharing it far and wide.

As a consumer of content, I do worry about what that will do to try to make a better-informed public.

From a marketing standpoint, there are great benefits to using AI. We can use it to help create meeting minutes, research arcane topics and review large data sets. We can also use it to help distill information from unwieldy reports, and we can use it to help improve writing.

As of today, I don’t know if asking AI to write content wholesale will return the best results. The best tool for creating compelling and engaging content is the human mind.

The mind just has to be allowed to work. The mistake marketers will make with AI is presuming that it will do it quicker and better. Yes, it will do it quicker. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

Will it do it better? One day, it certainly could and probably will. I don’t know if we’re at that point yet.

I think it’s even more interesting if we look at it from a journalism standpoint.

Most of the journalists I’ve talked to seem to have an aversion to artificial intelligence. Part of it stems from the idea that they’re trying to hold onto a monopoly.

They don’t even have the media industry as a whole, which hasn’t overcome social media. I know it sounds crazy, but how many media organizations still struggle to adapt to the social media era years after social media emerged?

The benefits of AI for journalism aren’t much different on the surface than those for marketing agencies.

Certainly, the ability to transcribe hours-long meetings in a matter of minutes is a huge time saver. Similarly, taking large data sets and distilling them into a couple of digestible bullet points is incredibly valuable.

Journalists should take it a step further and feed meeting minutes and other public documents into AI to help them understand actions taken, what people said and didn’t say in meetings, and identify other unanswered questions and action items.

I have found that using AI is not always accurate. Certainly, both marketers and journalists should double-check any information that AI generates.

The key for journalists and marketers is to approach it with a little suspicion. It’s natural and acceptable. But don’t immediately fear AI, just as they shouldn’t fear the latest technology.

They should be curious about it and consider how we could help them better perform their roles — to their constituents, clients and readers.

We can fear AI all we want. We might wish it had never come on the scene. We can hope it quietly goes away.

However, no matter what we wish, AI is here to stay, and we should embrace it, understand it and learn from it. By doing so, we will improve our value.