We respond to different kinds of writing differently. We do not expect a personal touch, for example, from a corporate document — no matter how much effort a PR team puts into it. We know the brochure or email we are reading (choose your type of organization here) is not tailored for us — even when a mail merge template uses our name.
Or perhaps I should say especially when it uses our name and then follows it with impersonal text.
But a direct message from someone we know, whether personally or professionally? We expect that to be from the person writing us.
And sound like it.
This is where AI-assisted writing will begin to differentiate itself from the writing we have engaged with up to now. If it is a corporate document — the kind of document we expect to have come from a committee then pass through many hands, no one will blink if they detect AI. I suspect that this is where AI-assisted writing will flourish and be truly beneficial.
To explain why, let me offer a story from a friend who used to work in a financial services company. Back in the 80s, some of their marketing team started using a new buzz word and they wanted to incorporate it into their product offerings, explaining to the writing team that they wanted to tell their older clients how they intended to be opportunistic with the money they had given them to invest.
The writers in the room, imagining little old ladies in Florida who preferred the Merriam Webster Dictionary definitions to whatever market-speak was the flavor of the month, were horrified and asked if the marketers understood that ‘opportunistic’ meant “exploiting opportunities with little regard to principle.” The marketers, oblivious to how their audience would near that word, had been prepared to tell their company’s clients they wanted to take advantage of them.
AI is simultaneously well positioned to catch mistakes like that and assist teams in fixing it and to manufacture such mistakes, which will need to be caught by the same teams — all based on the data (read: writing) it was trained on. I stress assist here because even the best generative AI needs to have its work looked over in the same way any human writer does. And because they are statistical models of language, they are subject to making the same kinds of mistakes the marketers I wasn’t mentioning did.
AIs will also be beneficial as first-pass editors, giving writers a chance to see what grammar and other issues might need fixing. I don’t expect to see them replacing human editors any time soon, as the skill to integrate changes into a text in someone else’s voice is a challenging skill to develop.
Personal correspondence, whether it is an email or a letter, and named-author writing will be the most challenging writing to integrate with generative AI. While lower level AI work of the kind we are currently used to — spellcheck and grammar checking — will continue to be tools that writers can freely use. I haven't downloaded Apple’s iPadOS 18 beta software but will be interested to see how it performs in that regard.
The kind of changes generative AI produces runs the risk of eroding the trust of the reader, whether they can put their finger on why they are uncomfortable with what they are reading or not.
Yes, there is a place for generative AI in the future of writing. I suspect the two companies best positioned to eventually take the lead are Apple (which is focusing its efforts on device, where it can learn the voice of a specific user ) and Google (which has been ingesting its users’ writing for some time, even it it has been for other purposes). Microsoft's Office suite could be similarly leveraged in the enterprise space but I don't have the sense people turn to it for personal writing.
That may tell you more about me than the general population.
These three usual suspects and whatever startups that believe they are ready to change our world will need to learn more about how to focus large language models on individual users more broadly. Most text editors can already complete sentences in our voices. The next hurdle will be getting these tools to effectively compose longer texts.
If, in fact, that is what we decide we want.*
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* Not go full 1984 on you, but I do wonder how the power to shift thought through language might be used and abused by corporations and nation states through a specifically trained LLM.