I used to think AI was garbage in, garbage out, now AT SCALE! Faster than ever! The food is bad, AND the portions are huge! AI chaos, now supersized!
But more and more I see something nuanced. If your content has been bad–inconsistent, inaccurate, or irrelevant to the user’s journey–AI won’t make it better.
AI *will* make those problems more prominent, dominant, and voluminous. This is about more than just a shocking number of fingers on an AI-generated hand. As Kristina Halvorson wrote about this chaos recently, you’re in for a wild ride!
When we look at LLMs, consider both large language models and large *learning* models, because learning is a more familiar problem. Think about a common mistake: do you ever get flustrated? Maybe you grew up hearing your parents say they were flustrated. Perhaps people in your hometown were flustrated–more than they were frustrated. (It turns out, dissimilation of consonant clusters causes many people to drop a repeated r sound. See also February.) But maybe you heard the mistake and repeated it, and now people around you do, too.
This isn’t a case for descriptivism vs. prescriptivism because language evolves much like all life forms evolve: it responds to external pressures and incorporates mutations that serve a purpose and advance communication. But consider what happens when we incorporate errors. Bad habits are hard to break. If you learned to drive and had a habit of riding the brake, it’s tough to unlearn that behavior–even when you see the risk and cost of overheating brake pads that don’t work as well over time. Children who grow up making or hearing articulation mistakes practice those mistakes every day in conversation, and it becomes difficult to unlearn habits–even when they hear correct pronunciation later in life.
If AI is the future in your organization, getting the content right needs to be the present–AND the future as you continue to watch for mutations. “Right” content is consistent with your message architecture and brand guidelines. It’s technically accurate and blessed by marketing, legal, and product development. And it’s relevant: you’ve structured it to deliver the right message in the right format at the right time. When your content strategy team gets the content right and works to keep it right, AI can be an efficient tool to serve them and your customers.
If your organization hasn’t invested in content strategy to deliver content that way, AI won’t be able to deliver it either. But it WILL make incorrect information more noticeable and propagate those errors to be more prominent, dominant, and voluminous.
That should cause anxiety–and yeah, maybe a reason to get flustrated.
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Originally published on LinkedIn
