Many years ago, I knew a star reporter whose news stories often made the front page. What readers didn’t know was that this journalist was not a good writer – the sub-editors always had to rework the copy extensively. But still, the journo was an incredible newshound, always able to sniff out the news on the ground and persuade resistant newsmakers to give exclusive interviews.
That was when I started questioning the act of writing. Well-written words can be crafted by anyone, but the true value lies in the content itself. Is the content TRUE and is it USEFUL? Can the content MOVE people to ACTION?
So when Gen AI came along in 2022 and demonstrated that well-written words actually have very little or ZERO value, I didn’t get outraged or upset like other communicators did. Today, a 5-year-old kid can paste a prompt and generate a professional press release or CEO speech. What the kid did is of the same value as an adult who wrote those same things without caring about the content’s value and integrity.
This image here is a slide from a webinar I did for Singapore civil servants recently. I got ChatGPT to generate a paragraph with fake information, but if you don’t follow the news or economy, you’d think it’s real. This is due to the “well-written” words and “data-driven” approach, both previously signifiers of “intelligence”. But again, the real intelligence lies in giving people useful and true information in a clear manner. Writing in a boring corporate style, or in a flowery way (as many kids are taught to do) is now exposed by Gen AI to be a waste of time.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s always critical for humans to write well, because writing is thinking. The way we write and edit our words mirrors our thought processes. That’s why we cannot give up our writing to AI, because it means giving up our mental faculty. But fancy words and perfect sentences don’t mean anything if they are empty and insincere, and if nobody cares about what you really have to say.
