Copy of a Copy of a Copy

Are robots coming for our jobs?

This is a question that people have been asking for several decades.

It may seem that this question is new, but technology has been with us for a lot longer than we often recognize in the moment. Whatever’s newest and most unfamiliar and seems disruptive becomes what we focus on. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the conversation around automation and technology has been going on for a long time.

Today, the talk is about artificial intelligence. It's not that AI is a new topic. It's simply that the speed at which new AI tools are entering our daily lives has increased exponentially. 

Plenty of questions arise, including:

• What role will AI play in how we work and live moving forward?
• How will it free up or steal our time?
• Will certain jobs disappear?

Question #1 is ever changing. For those of us who use Siri or Alexa, AI is already embedded in our lives.

Question #2 is a matter of personal choice. Certain AI apps like Siri or Alexa can save us time once we learn how to use them correctly. Other AI apps can take us down rabbit holes, stealing time we can never get back.

And Question #3, the one about jobs?

Well, of course certain jobs will disappear. That isn't anything new. You look back 100 years ago, and the way the world was, and there were jobs in the 1920s that no longer exist in the 2020s. The same will be true 10, 50, 100 years from now.

That’s progress and that’s good.

The Thing about AI

So what is all the fuss about AI?

Something I've been thinking about recently is AI and being a writer. Like thousands of other writers, I paid attention back in November of 2022 when an app called Chat GPT made its big splash on the world stage. I think you have to be living under a rock not to know that this tool now exists. It's not the first AI tool to come out on the market to help with writing and generating content.

But it's the one that's gotten the most attention. If you play on LinkedIn like I do, you'll see posts galore talking about Chat GPT, everything from "Hey, I created this entire post using chat GPT, what do you think?" to the other extreme where people are saying, "We need to ban it from the schools! It's going to interfere with children's ability to develop critical thinking skills!" 

I've been using an AI tool for generating written content for at least three years. But I don't use it a lot. Every now and then I pop in some ideas and then see what pops out. The thing about good writing, one of the hallmarks of really good writing, writing that’s memorable, writing that touches the soul or the heart or both writing that makes an impact is something called voice.

Voice is that distinctive quality related to its creator.

So far, AI can't generate voice the way a human creator can.

Everyone has a voice, certainly. In the creative world, artists of all kinds have voices. Steven Spielberg, as a movie maker, as a filmmaker, has a voice. You see something made by him. There's a sense about it that this is a Steven Spielberg film.

If you go to an art museum, like I did, a couple of weeks ago, I was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City looking at the paintings. Picasso is a Picasso because he had a voice through how and what he painted.

Musicians, poets, dancers, playwrights, actors, even athletes… all have voices.

Look at the popularity of the TV show “The Voice.” Why do so many people tune in to watch shows like that?

Because we appreciate authenticity. We want to see and experience something real. We want to be a witness to what makes humans human.

Can you imagine if “The Voice” featured contestants who were lip syncing AI generated music?

Ugh!

It might be a novelty for a season. But it wouldn’t last.

Voice and AI

All things that are created have a voice, they have a distinction, something that makes them different from everybody else.

Artificial Intelligence is cool, for sure. It's definitely fun to play around with the different apps, for example, like chat GPT for generating written content, and Lensa.ai, an app which generates avatars of your selfies in a variety of predefined styles. These variations of who you are, are fascinating.

But as far as writing goes, here's the thing that most people aren't talking about. Basically, when you use an artificial intelligence app to generate written content, what it generates is limited to what already exists on the Internet.

In other words, it’s not making up something original in its AI brain. It can only compile variations of what already exists.

So in a very simplified way, how these apps work is you open them up, and then you can ask a series of questions or there may be some designated styles, like you want to write a blog post, or you want to create a Facebook ad, or you want to generate a series of headlines that you might use in a marketing campaign. You type in some key words, some ideas, and then it will scour the Internet and bring back to you three, five, or however many variations you've designated you want to see. Then you can review them and use the ones you like.

Here’s where the distinction is made.

Lazy writers will simply copy and paste what the app generates.

Really good writers -- conscientious writers -- take what's generated and then put their own spin on it. Give it their voice.

What AI generates feels and sounds flat. AI content lacks voice.

AI's Limitations

AI can be a great way to brainstorm and get some good baselines to start a writing project. The danger is if people are just taking what is spit back to them without working through fact checking and so forth, without making it their own by giving it voice — well, that’s grounds for trouble. Maybe not right away. But possibly down the road if you simply copy and paste what the app gives you. The negative consequences might not be immediate. But there are ethical questions around plagiarism and also mistakes.

Not to mention boring writing.

Case in point. I was listening to a podcast interview featuring a man who did very, very well in Silicon Valley and has exited numerous companies and you know, is a bazillionaire who is now putting his money into some of these artificial intelligence tools and companies that are working 24/7 to develop them.

He decided to take Chat GPT for a ride, asking it to generate a bio about him that might be read at a conference. What the app created was loaded with mistakes. The copy claimed he had a degree from Oxford University, which he does not. It also said that he had formed a specific company, which he had not.

There were other mistakes as well. Those are just surface level examples.

I decided to try this experiment for myself, using my name. After signing up for a free account in Chat GPT, I gave it the following command:

“Write a bio for Mary Lou Kayser.”

Then I literally watched it compose a 200-word bio.

Some of it is accurate, but several key points are one hundred percent false. For example, it says that I earned a BS in Journalism from the University of Kansas.

Nope.

It also said I wrote a book about leadership and Jazzercise.

Also incorrect.

If I was relying on someone to generate content for me and they used this tool, sent this copy off to a conference, and it was publicly shared?

I’d not only be embarrassed, but angry.

Chat GPT gives you the option of regenerating a response, so I ran it a second time and discovered more things about myself that aren’t true.

The app does have a warning on its dashboard that reads: Limitations: may occasionally generate incorrect information.

Only As Good as Its User

Here's the thing -- like any tool, AI is only as good as the user. So for people who are thinking, Oh, you know, I can just dictate something and AI is going to do all the work for me is dangerous thinking.

Again, you might get away with it for a while, but eventually people are going to catch on.

The other key point here we need to pay attention to is this:

You might remember what copies of copies of copies look like if you are a certain age. You might remember, back in the day when you were in elementary school or middle school or high school even, that’s what teachers would do with the handouts, they would make copies of copies of copies. It could reach the point where what happened to the original became so faded, you couldn’t even read the damn thing.

Right?

The same thing begins to happen when you are pulling content from a limited pool. Granted, the limited pool of content on the Internet is enormous, but it is limited. We are already seeing copies of copies of copies and it’s only going to get worse.

This, at some point, is going to reach a saturation point if it hasn't already. That was another point that was brought up in the interview I just mentioned. He said the amount of information that the tools can scour is, by its nature, limited. We're already running out of where to go to get content. There's only so much written about, let's say, the band Led Zeppelin, right, or Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

The question, of course, for all of us is, is this what we want? Do we want AI generated content -- whether it’s words or images or sounds -- representing who we are?

If you are in a business that requires content generation, I get it. It's a big job, it can be a tedious job. The demand for content is insatiable. I've been talking about that for years. When I first got into content marketing ten years ago, specifically, I was like, Whoa, the content marketing monster is insatiable no matter how much you feed it, it still wants more.

So of course a tool that promises to punch out content that you can simply copy and paste into your social feed or on your website is alluring. It is cool to be able to generate a long form post using a tool that doesn't require as much brain power or time as sitting in front of a blank page and coming up with something original all on your own. Again, I get the time issue, I get the efficiency issue.

At the End of the Day, It Comes to This

If you’re going to swim, you have to jump into the pool eventually. Keep in mind what else is in that pool? and what are some of the conditions that you can expect to find in it, because the crawl may not be the best stroke in that pool, you may need to do the butterfly, you may need to do the backstroke, you may need to doggy paddle, right, you may or may need to be able to hold your breath underwater for a little bit longer than normal.

The conversation about AI is just getting started. I believe we need to be actively talking about technology and tools that become available so that we can make intelligent decisions and not get sucked into something that is either going to take time away from what really matters or we get into something and then find ourselves over our heads and have to try to scramble to get out of it.

As with anything new, there will be early adopters, there will be a boatload of people who resist. Some people will ignore the new stuff altogether. It's the bell curve at its best.

Ultimately, we each have to ask ourselves, is our brand, our reputation, the kind of work that we do worth a copy of a copy of a copy?

Or do we learn how to use these tools in a way so that what we do generate has that sense of an original voice and a sense of, Oh, that's different. That's new. That's cool. That doesn't sound like everything else.

At the end of the day, learn to use your creative juices, use your brain power, be a critical thinker. I will go to my grave believing that. I'm all about original conversations, deep conversations, and asking big questions so that we can live more meaningful, rewarding, and fulfilling lives.

There’s probably room in that equation for AI as long as we’re paying attention to what it’s doing and why we’re using it.