The Peril and Opportunity of AI

I’m quite threatend by generative AI, honestly. I’ve written four books, and and lots of other stuff, both personal and professional.

Writing has been my superpower. My differentiator. It’s a big part of what got me to the point I’m at now.

Generative AI seems perfect for thought leadership. Lots of people struggle to create content, and if AI can help them get over that obstacle, then we’ll be better for it. There are lots people out there doing amazing things, but they don’t have the confidence or time to create the content around them.

So, this is the opportunity of AI – that it will enable more people to create content around more things.

However, there are some downsides –

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We’ll clearly get more garbage content. The need to invest significant work to create good content was a filtering mechanism. I’m trying not to be elitist, but a lot of what comes out of AI will simply be Performative. We’ll get some pure fabrications and a fair amount of exaggerations.

This sounds silly say out loud, but part of the value of thought leadership is that it’s representative of a default…state, or body of knowledge. Writing a case study about something amazing implies that this is a thing you do and understand.

Gen AI may give us a lot of content that’s not representative of the nature and character of the person who publishes it. It would be the literary equivalent of faking a resume.

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One of the goals of thought leadership – for me at least – is personal development. Thinking through a problem enough to create content around it helps me process it, test it, and put it in perspective.

I write to learn, and to solidify what I know. Dissecting something enough to explain to someone else makes me understand it in new ways.

Gen AI might strip a lot of this value.

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Gen AI has a tendency to create deriviative content. People claim that it’s just a “starting point” and they make it personal, but I’ve seen enough content go straight from ChatGPT to a URL somewhere to know that’s not always true.

When AI starts ideating thought leadership and generating the words, are we going to stuck in a big vat of sameness? Part of the value is the personality of it – the voice behind it. We need to preserve that voice, and I don’t know how Gen AI is going to affect that.

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More generally, I wonder how Gen AI will upset the process of evaluating the value of something.

Is part of the value of good thought leadership artifacts that we subconciously understand and respect the time that went into them? Will AI upset this heuristic?

I’m thiking of a blog post I wrote 20 years ago entitled “Do we put more intellectual value on information we pay for?.”

When we consume content that obviously took a lot of time to create, we realize and appreciate the value and scarcity of it. What happens when we can’t know if something took someone a long time and a career of experience, or if ChatGPT just vomited it out in 10 minutes?

I’m happy when I think about a smart, talented person who doesn’t communicate well learning how to use AI to break through that barrier – in my dreams, we’re all better for how that works out. But there is the potential for downsides, and we’d be derelict not to acknowledge that.