Author generated summary:

AI-generated communications are:

• worse, not better
  less effective (unclear)
  less efficient (slowing us down)
  creating a lonelier, more polarized, more isolated, and less intelligent society

Instead, focus on:

• developing human intelligence
  invest in building relationships
  develop your skills: learn and practice communications skills

TLDR: to tackle today’s greatest challenges, we need to improve our own human listening and communications skills.

Being a leadership and mindset coach who specializes in communications, much of my work could be summarized as real-time editing. Whether it’s helping people edit the inner language that defines their worldview (what you might call perspective, narrative, or mindset work), working with clients on drafts for presentations or other important documents, or my communications with clients between sessions, my days are largely focused on language and how to communicate better.

Lately I’m seeing more and more AI generated language, as I’m sure you are too. And frankly, it’s not very good.

• Effective communications is clear and concise.
• AI generated language is neither.
• It tends to be long-winded, vague, and confusing.

To borrow from the Talking Heads: AI is ‘talking a lot, but not saying anything.”

Generally, and consistently, it’s not clear, certainly not concise, and reliably ineffective. While it attempts to masquerade as effective and impressive with trendy big words and excessive verbosity, it’s mostly just wasting our time.

When clients bring AI-generated drafts to our sessions to review, it usually has no clear, focused central message, and because we spend so much time sorting through the rambling slop it generally takes more time to edit than it would take to draft a quality message from scratch. In most cases, it’s a more efficient use of time to start from a blank page and put some focused thought into our message.

Beyond the lack of efficiency in working with AI-generated language, the is the impact on our mental state is worth exploring. When we work on a message organically, typically the process is clarify for clients and leaves us both feeling more energized and focused for the work ahead. When we spend our time trying to edit and make sense of the bot-slop, the after effects tend to be undesirable: leaving us feeling more tired and irritable, less clear and focused, generally foggy, and often with a nagging headache.

At least as far as language and communication are concerned, AI is not delivering any of it’s claimed benefits.

I have yet to be presented with any AI-generated content that managed to deliver a clear message concisely and effectively.

It’s slowing us down, wasting our time, diminishing our own skillsets and attention spans, while trashing the environment, and when the AI bubble inevitably pops, it will soon be crashing our economy.

It’s quite ironic, given that most AI is categorized as ‘large language models,’ how truly terrible it is at using language for it’s core purpose: to communicate clearly.

I’m not writing this to be controversial.

I am writing this because I believe we can do better.

With more than 3 decades spent focusing how to improve language, I know we can do better.

I am writing because I believe in developing human intelligence, in all its capacities. Because I believe that our ability to communicate with one another is what we truly need to progress as individuals, as teams, and as a society.

What we need to tackle today’s and tomorrow’s biggest challenges is better listening skills, deeper empathy, and enhanced abilities to express ourselves clearly and effectively. The more we outsource our communications to bots, the more we forfeit our own development opportunities and diminish our own capabilities. We’re sacrificing our learning and development for lower quality real-time results.

We’re looking for shortcuts in the wrong places. We have to communicate better if we want to solve today’s biggest challenges.

The rampant use of AI-generated language is slowing down our work and progress at every level: more AI slop sent through the workplace creates more emails to read (or not) and more meetings. Our effort to save time is slowing everything down, creating more chaos and confusion.

The most impressive high-octane clients on my roster are consistently leveraging their relationships and interpersonal skills, not rampant tech adoption, to drive positive change in their organizations. We have to listen and communicate with our fellow humans in order to develop the relationships and skillsets needed to drive true progress (not to be confused for chaos and churn often mislabeled as ‘progress’).

If we’re not talking and communicating with each other, we’re not building those key relationships or our skillsets.

On a deeper level, interpersonal connection and communications is part of who are as humans. Communications skills — listening and self-expression — is how we connect to each other. We are social beings: the more we pass over developing and practicing our communications skills, the more we fall victim to increased isolation, loneliness, and the despair and depression fueled by the loss of person-to-person connection.

Despite so-called ‘social’ media that claims that tech will bring us closer together, we’ve never been more isolated and lonely as a species. We’ve never had a greater need to build our abilities to connect and communicate with each other.

These alleged tools are not for us, they are created by and for the ultraweathly, for their own benefits, and for the purposes of greater consolidation of wealth and power. These tools and purposes are aimed at creating greater division of our society by polarizing society and by diminishing our attention spans and our abilities to think and speak for ourselves.

Because we tend to like what’s new and shiny, we’ve been conned into using these ‘tools’ and training these LLM’s, for free, so that they become smarter and more powerful so that the ultrawealthy can use them to layoff more workers while lining their own pockets.

So I encourage you not to believe the hype, and instead let’s return to thinking and speaking for ourselves. And instead of investing in AI, let’s invest in developing our own human intelligence, building our skillsets and deepening our humanity through better communications and greater connection. Let’s practice listening better and focus on communicating with each other.