How to avoid A.I. slop-ification
Hi leaders,
Out of everything I’ve heard about A.I. as of late, something from a recent podcast felt poignant. The podcaster said something along the lines of “this tool doesn’t cause the low-value slop, it just shows the cracks in what our systems had previously valued.” I think that’s correct
There have been some major studies on A.I. in business in the last few months–probably because it’s a trending topic, and there are a lot of concerns over how it’s going to affect the larger economy. So researchers are joining in. One of the largest studies I found was with 48,000 interviewees from all around the world.
However, rather than get into specifics from studies, I want to talk about two things that really inform what I notice about A.I. currently.
The world of teaching
So our Sway affiliate (and my wonderful partner) Trevor is actually a university literature professor–a space that’s probably more affected by A.I. slop than any other.
When asked how A.I. has affected teaching, Trevor said that once you realize and embrace that students are using it, you just have to be more specific and creative with structuring assignments. He said he’s switched to a lot more in-person speaking and thinking, making students keep journals, and that the writing assignments he gives students are more specified. He also said he checks citations a lot more because A.I. will just make up quotations that don’t exist.
He also said that the writing he gets now actually feels a lot more personal and creative than when he taught before A.I. writing tools existed.
Entrepreneurs
As many of you know, I started Sway as an entrepreneur, and in the early days, I mostly coached other entrepreneurs–people getting their businesses off the ground. Back in my day (imagine me putting on my old-lady face), a big part of who was successful was simply about who was strategic enough and willing to put in the administrative labor and boldness to back their plans.
Now it seems like A.I. has changed some of that. You can generate an hour-long presentation in less than 30 seconds. Marketers can produce more copywriting language in a day than they would’ve been able to do in a month previously.
But the problem is that A.I. can’t think, and it still needs you to look and say, “I want to do that,” or “I don’t want to do that.” “People will like this.” “People won’t like this.” We must become better assessors of the quality of our work, whereas before, the fact that it existed at all would have been enough of a measure of its goodness.
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I guess what I’m trying to say is that we as professionals are actually in a really interesting time where we can dive more into what we specifically value in our work. There’s a kind of space opened up by A.I., knowing that generic things can be created with such ease.
If you are a leader with any kind of oversight, now is a good time to go “really dumb” (double finger quotes), when it comes to thinking about your workplace values. How can you reconnect with what’s most important? How can meetings cut the generic and get to the marrow of a topic? How do you want the world to be better? How do you want your employees to talk about their time at your company five years after they’ve left?
A.I. gives you very literally an infinity of options, but it is still up to you, the human leader to choose from them, make a roadmap, and ascribe value as you go. Rather than be nihilistic or utopian about A.I., this is actually a great moment to dig into our big beliefs and think about how to restructure things based on what’s most important to us.
