Bot Text Chronicles

It’s interesting to see what AI is throwing back at us and how people are reacting.

First, we had Gemini’s ‘woke’ imagery, which, if you didn’t know better, could totally change your perception of the reality of history.

Then we have it just brazenly making stuff up – what’s known in the field as an AI hallucination. (So, fact checking is an absolute MUST, for everything it writes.)

Then we have ‘concern’ at how AI representing bias in gender stereotypes. I mean, as a big ol’ plagiarism generator, all it’s doing right now is reflecting everything we are and have done back at us; that’s how AI is trained – on existing stuff. So I’m thinking it’s a perhaps a little bit much right at this moment to think it should reflect some idealistic view of how we’d like to be, rather than how we are. That, would actually be a hallucination, no?

And aside from that, already on X this week, I’ve seen people complaining that ‘all emails sound the same these days’.

Erm, yes, they do!

Human intervention needed

The stumbling block is that if we have a tool that does the job for us (copywriting in this case) and the result looks competent, it’s easy to think that that’s it – job done. Seems we are all a little bit lazy or all a little bit pushed for time and may, at this point, be thinking that AI is a lot more capable than it is; that it can read our minds and put exactly what we wanted it to put.

The fact is, human intervention is still needed: to proofread, to fact check, to edit into house style – and, it seems, more than anything, to sanity check.

Starting a published paper with the words, “Certainly. Here is a possible introduction for your topic” does not suggest that the paper is credible. Proofreading would have been a very good idea. [There was an example of this very thing on X this evening, but it has now been edited, so there’s nothing to see at the original link’s destination, unfortunately.]

Don’t be lazy

But, as we said: if it looks like AI’s done the job, laziness kicks in. People are just copying, pasting and using the raw text. That’s why we’re getting these kinds of gaffes.

It’s not AI’s fault.

It’s ours.

Save your brand from embarrassment by being the human element!

Any one else seen any AI gaffes that have made you chuckle this week?

#StayInCharge #ThinkForYourself