If you’re like me, you’ve seen an abundance of content highlighting the remarkable shift in generative AI over the last few months. It appears that there is a new version of ChatGPT, a startup, or a big tech company launching a new product or feature designed to revolutionize the way we work. I just finished reading a comprehensive article by Bill Gates, The Age of AI Has Begun, and I want to talk about a line that stood out to me:
Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.
GatesNotes
There has been an abundance of evidence that email has made us less productive since its introduction. Worse, real-time communication tools like Slack have compounded this effect and have reduced our ability to focus on actual work. Don’t just take my word for it, Cal Newport has written several well-researched books based off the changes to our brains and working habits.
I’ve been experimenting with these generative AI tools, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, and it has already been immensely helpful in accelerating my day to day tasks. However, most of the examples I’m seeing in promotional videos are built to remove the “human aspect” from the work.
In one example I saw, managers should ask AI tools to, “Draft a welcome email to my new team member.” Now, imagine being the newest team member and receiving an email from your new boss, written by AI… Is that really the warm welcome that we should be promoting in an on-site, hybrid, or remote world?
If you’re the new employee on the team, you may already be using the company’s same AI tools to parse your inbox on your behalf and summarize your boss’s welcome email for you. In a matter of seconds, we’ve gone full circle. Here were my results when testing this:
The computing power required to write, and subsequently read, one email using AI is small. But when you multiply this by thousands or millions of use cases, the computing power required to create content that will never be read by a human is substantial. At some level, we have an obligation to not waste energy and computing power generating drivel. Other examples that I’ve already seen include marketing and lead generation emails, cover letters, and blog posts.
If we’re not careful, this will be the next generation of content farms and SEO spam, except it will be inside our workplaces instead of limited to search results.
What does this mean?
- Valuable content still matters and the human aspect of our work is far from obsolete. There have already been debates over the relevance of cover letters in the job application process, and I expect to see similar debates flow into other written traditions in workplaces. Successfully finding valuable content will be where the biggest search engines win – the same as it always has been.
- As we start to embrace AI in our personal and professional lives, we must be careful not to lean on it to replace our own emotional labor or the empathetic requirements of our jobs, such as making a new team member feel welcome. This would be the equivalent of hiring digital nannies to raise our children.
- Brevity will be more important. Skip the runaround of writing an AI-enhanced formal email and an AI parsed summary of the email. Just say the damn thing.
