Early in my career, I was given “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White as a gift.
First published in 1920, one of the greatest lessons in its thin and pocket-sized pages is how writing tools influence our writing: your smartphone text would be vastly different created on a typewriter.
More than a hundred years later, we find ourselves using Generative Artificial Intelligence to write at work, home, and school; filtering our diverse, nuanced, and individual ideas through many of the same programs. Have you considered how this influences what you read and write? Will this ultimately influence how we talk?
Growing Repetition & Diminished Quality.
Scientific American reports that words preferred by ChatGPT, such as delve, realm, and meticulous, are becoming more common in everyday conversations. This should be no surprise: millions of people turn to the same AI tools in order to perfectly convey their thoughts. When everyone asks AI to “make this better,” it will attempt grammar accuracy from the knowledge it is fed, not an actual human experience that is felt. AI tools are programmed with what scientists call “machine learning,” and can only attempt to imitate emotional nuance.
Which brings us neatly back to Strunk and White.
This week, the literary magazine Granta published Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” as a Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize finalist. Despite its praise from Granta’s judges for “precise yet richly evocative” language, readers noticed some odd metaphors bearing the hallmarks of AI:
“The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”
“She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”
Online debates regarding the ethics of author usage of AI ensued. The publication LitHub wrapped its coverage of the news encouraging readers to browse other stories for potential AI.
This controversy took place just a few days after Hachette had canceled its US launch plans for author Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl.” Max Spero, CEO of AI detection software Pangram, examined the novel and concluded with high confidence that the book was “largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted.”
The flood of AI-enabled writing is already here. As the volume of LLM created works continues to grow it may become harder for new human voices to be discovered. This doesn’t just affect the authors, publishing houses, and every day people leaning on AI to communicate with confidence.
This is also our new challenge as strategists.
We constantly adapt to help our clients challenge their old ways with the new. But as we evolve ourselves, we must consider how to embrace AI as an assistant while keeping our voice as authors.