AI - Underwear and Underwater
As this month’s Connect Newsletter is all about technology, it seems logical to include something about AI and its role in workplace writing.
Now I’m a fan of tools that can help writers and reduce time. I have never advocated burning the OED or Roget’s Thesaurus in the same way that I have never smashed my daughter’s tablet for using Grammarly, Tik-Tok, yes but Grammarly, no...
Beef with AI
However, here’s my beef with AI and by beef I mean a Texas Long Horn cross bread with a Black Angus, a Herefordshire bull and a Chianina monster cow. AI relies on a vast bank of documents - a deep well, if you will, of workplace writing from which it extracts buckets full of content and produces whatever prompt you submit to quench the thirst of your dehydrated readers. So here’s the rub guys – the majority and by majority I mean almost all workplace writing in that ginormous underground reservoir of business plans, project proposals, press releases, regulatory reports, meeting minutes and most significantly government gobbledygook is pants! And by pants, I mean utter, utter pants.
AI undergarment 1: ‘Long Johns’
Now, I know you’re confused but let me explain. These pants can be divided into two types: first of all, we have ‘Long Johns’. This is the kind of administrative officialese written by middle-aged single people with two cats and an addiction to the passive voice. Common phrases used by Long Johns include ‘please be informed that there will be a meeting tomorrow’ instead of ‘there will be a meeting tomorrow’ and my personal favourite from a few years ago ‘a dialogue platform will be implemented by the government to facilitate a meaningful exchange with the public’ by which it meant
‘we would like to talk to you’.
AI undergarment 2: ‘Hipster Self-identifying Strawberry IPA Boxer Brief’
The second type of undergarment in the AI wardrobe is the ‘Hipster Self-identifying Strawberry IPA Boxer Brief’. This undergarment represents the type of business jargon ubiquitous among Hollywood public relations companies, CEOs of global coffee shops and people who bang on about being permanently awake. Examples include ‘delivering an immersive ultra-premium, coffee-forward experience’ (Kellaway, 2016) and ‘I’ll reach out to you offline so we can co-create innovative win-wins’.
What a choice AI gives us – archaic colonial civil service speak or the omni-channeled shambles of the buzzword generation.
So what’s my point?
Well very simply put, if the only thing you’ve got to choose from is rubbish, you’re going to get rubbish. Therefore, learn how to write Plain English clearly and concisely now and perhaps, just perhaps the AI bank, the AI well, the AI closet will have a more appropriate selection of language to generate in erm... maybe fifty years?
Write on
