Image: Pexels/SHVETS Production Let’s say you want to compete in the Tour de France. You study what it takes to keep pace with the world's best cyclists. To your dismay, you learn that the average cyclist trains 30 hours every week for months, maybe years. You don’t have time to work that hard. So you enter the race with an e-bike—and you win!
Congratulations! You get all the kudos without all that wasted training time.
But what have you lost in doing so?
That’s the question communicators need to keep before them as we consider using artificial intelligence in our work—especially in writing.
At a recent conference, I heard a speaker suggest that communicators-in-training ought to give short shrift to writing skills in favor of other strengths—editorial judgment, strategic thinking, and so forth. Why? Because artificial intelligence will handle basic writing needs.
In the speaker’s defense, he was sharing a notion he gleaned elsewhere. He didn’t advocate the idea. But neither did he object to it. So I did.
“I’m not against using AI as a tool to help us communicate better,” I said. “But you can’t be a great editor with sound editorial judgment if you’re a crappy writer.”
You might think an older practitioner like me is simply doing the modern equivalent of “get off my lawn.” You would be wrong. While I’m not above greeting shiny new tools with a pinch of skepticism, I’m well aware that AI is causing a sea change in every corner of our lives. And I’m not opposed to using it in creative, constructive and careful ways.
What I do oppose is handing over critical, strategic human thinking—with all the emotion, good and bad, that comes with it—to a binary-coded shadow. The power of writing isn’t in its output alone. It’s in the difficult, careful, time-consuming, human process that goes with it. The harder we work at honing our writing skills, the better thinkers and communicators we become.
“Writing,” opined historian David McCullough, “is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Yet we seem prone to giving up the hard work in the name of efficiency. And I shudder to think what we’re leaving behind because of it.
Congratulations! You get all the kudos without all that wasted training time.
But what have you lost in doing so?
That’s the question communicators need to keep before them as we consider using artificial intelligence in our work—especially in writing.
At a recent conference, I heard a speaker suggest that communicators-in-training ought to give short shrift to writing skills in favor of other strengths—editorial judgment, strategic thinking, and so forth. Why? Because artificial intelligence will handle basic writing needs.
In the speaker’s defense, he was sharing a notion he gleaned elsewhere. He didn’t advocate the idea. But neither did he object to it. So I did.
“I’m not against using AI as a tool to help us communicate better,” I said. “But you can’t be a great editor with sound editorial judgment if you’re a crappy writer.”
You might think an older practitioner like me is simply doing the modern equivalent of “get off my lawn.” You would be wrong. While I’m not above greeting shiny new tools with a pinch of skepticism, I’m well aware that AI is causing a sea change in every corner of our lives. And I’m not opposed to using it in creative, constructive and careful ways.
What I do oppose is handing over critical, strategic human thinking—with all the emotion, good and bad, that comes with it—to a binary-coded shadow. The power of writing isn’t in its output alone. It’s in the difficult, careful, time-consuming, human process that goes with it. The harder we work at honing our writing skills, the better thinkers and communicators we become.
“Writing,” opined historian David McCullough, “is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Yet we seem prone to giving up the hard work in the name of efficiency. And I shudder to think what we’re leaving behind because of it.
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