I read an article the other day on LinkedIn. It went ‘viral’! Viral in that it got a lot of people talking. A lot of people sharing it. The article was not well researched, but, it touched a few people’s hearts… so it was shared over and over again…
Let me rephrase, I started reading the article. The inaccuracies made me stop even before I reached halfway point. The author started off telling us about his experiences, then added his expertise… it was his expertise that I doubted. Had he just given us his experiences and his emotions, I would have believed it was true. It read like something… regurgitated from somewhere… read like a script… too perfect, too rehearsed… too structed… too unoriginal… so matter of fact even about wrong things… it had to be AI! I could not be bothered, I did not even share it with anyone else. I stopped reading and basically ‘trashed it’! When someone else in the team shared it again… I did not even bother sharing my thoughts.
The author was trying so hard to establish himself as an authority, but, he came off as fake and not knowing anything to me. So I did not bother. The other problem was, all of his articles were negative. In a world that is going through so much, all this negative writing that just brings problems with no solutions is annoying… to me! Annoying may be too strong of a word, it is just too much! With all the wars and problems in the world, I really do not care that people are not getting their groceries in an hour or 30 minutes. I do not care that some companies are blue while others are green! I do not care what colour or shape people are. At this point in my life, I just want people to get along. I want a little bit of peace, not just for myself, but for everyone! I am delusional, aren’t I?
We are trying so hard to be relevant, to be connected, that we are using tools that are meant to help us in such evil ways. While discussing something else in the office, the article eventually made its way into our discussion… which is exactly what the author hoped for. For enough people to start talking about it and for him to be seen as an expert even though we all know he really does not know anything about what he expertly wrote about. Which made me wonder, why are we not using AI to spread positivity and change the narrative? Does it have to be all negative? Does it all need to be disparaging? Why can’t we use AI to offer solutions instead of just over magnifying small irrelevant problems? In 5 years, 10 years, how many purely creative people will we have? How many writers will we have who will be giving us relevant creative stories or articles? Who will read what if we are all going to AI to write things for us? What are we using our brains for if we are using AI to do our work for us? Please note, I am not advocating for us to stop using AI, far from it. I am just saying that maybe there are rooms where we need to shut AI out… We cannot be all things now that we have AI. We still need to have limits, we still need to think and apply our minds, ourselves in all situations.
I could go on and on, but, I do not want to overly labour the point… AI is killing creativity! Yes, you get more articles out, but, if they all look and sound like trash, then what is the point? And I am by no means saying the writer of the article should stop writing, no, but, I would love to read well written, well researched and accurate posts from him that are not trying to drive people into a frenzy with AI!