AI is coming for your job!

I don’t think of myself as a dinosaur, a Luddite or a modern day Canute but I must confess the rapid rise of AI worries me. Generative AI is already deeply embedded in our everyday lives and its continued rise and growing influence looks unstoppable.

Many who write for a living - including speechwriters, like me - already use it to assist them in their work and often talk in glowing terms about its usefulness . Surely you can’t argue with that - but I’m going to!

An early manifestation of AI, autocorrect, and it’s more sophisticated sibling, predictive text, serve as salutary reminders of just how predictable the vast majority of spoken and written linguistic communications are. This shouldn’t be surprising - language’s predictability is essential to its functionality and evolutionary success. Without language’s predictability our attempts to communicate with each other would get lost in a meaningless, Tower of Babel-like din.

But the success of Large Language Models highlights an uncomfortable truth: human beings - that’s you and me - are so much more predictable than we’d like to think we are. It’s an uncomfortable truth that raises profound philosophical questions concerning free will, determinism and human exceptionalism.

Even a rudimentary understanding of how LLMs work offers an insight into why most speeches and presentations are dull and predictable affairs. LLMs are trained by feeding them on gargantuan datasets. That’s a euphemistic way of saying big tech continually stuffs them with the totality of the world’s knowledge - almost all of which now exists in digital form. And however mind boggling the thought, this ‘totality’ really does cover absolutely everything you can think of, and more: books, articles, blogs, websites, social media posts, etc. - this includes your data and my data too, with or without our permission.

So if AI is such a useful tool, why don’t I take advantage of its capabilities to give myself an easier and more productive professional life? I can think of a number of reasons, but the most important one follows from what I’ve already said.

At the moment, AI is capable of producing speech and presentation outlines that are for the most part predictably dependable and fit-for-purpose, but its lack of creativity and originality mean that it can’t yet compete with the very best speechwriters. This situation will no doubt change if, and when, AI science’s ambition of AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - becomes a reality.

And as AI starts to take away jobs from writers in much the same way the advent of the word processor consigned secretarial jobs in typing pools to oblivion, I believe our only slim advantage over AI is the creativity, unpredictability and originality that separates us from it - for the time being, at least.

There’s an old joke about a city slicker on a weekend visit to the countryside who gets lost while out walking. He comes across a local yokel leaning against a field gate and asks him for the quickest way back to the village. The yokel pauses for a moment, rubs his chin and says “well if I were you, I wouldn’t have started from here.”

I feel the same way about using AI to come up with the first draft of a speech. Predictably competent is no longer an option if you want to safeguard and extend your speechwriting career. So don’t let AI lull you into a false sense of security; remember, it’s coming for your job!