In short order, the explosion of generative AI technology has changed the way we read and write for one another, especially in journalism and blogging. While the many AI tools all appear to be useful on the surface, I fear we’ve lost our human connection along the way.
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Rather than individually stringing hand-chosen words into intentional sentences, it’s now possible to use tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to turn a short summary into a full-length blog post. While I’m sure that a few well-meaning authors out there may be using these tools to simply speed up their workflows, there are significantly more bad actors who are turning to AI to create content instead of hiring writers.
For every painstaking original work, there are a dozen near-copies that were automatically digested, rewritten, and republished by a machine. Google Search, somehow seeming to not know any better – or worse, not care – happily surfaces these reproductions, affording them equal standing and therefore equal viewership, though that’s supposed to change.
Even our personal communications are not immune to the influence of AI. Need a cover letter? Ask ChatGPT or Gemini. Having trouble with an email? Gmail has “Help me write.” Not sure how to continue a friendly conversation? Google Messages offers contextual “Magic Compose.”
Meanwhile, AI has become just as infectious on the reader’s end. Rather than actually reading what someone has written, Google and others have made it possible to “Generate” an AI summary of an article within seconds.
The end result is that AI is generating a veritable firehose of online content that is simply being read and digested by another AI. Summaries become word vomit only to be turned back into summaries once more.
At its core, writing is all about communication. It’s people sharing their knowledge and ideas with other people. Writing is also about building a connection with one another, even people who lived centuries apart.
The question I’m left to ponder is: When did we stop talking to each other?
Somewhere along the way, we stopped valuing what our fellow human beings had to say. The mantra of “too long; didn’t read” has progressed to the point that AI is now handling both the reading and the writing for us, turning the written word into a bizarre and impersonal game of telephone.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a silver bullet to solve these problems. All I can do is offer my sincere thanks for reading these words for yourself.
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Top comment by Doru Oprisan
Excellent article. Also, all this idea of speeding up workflow is pushed without first asking: speeding it up for what? So we can get more tasks and feel even more overwhelmed? Just to make some corps richer? If we look at what productivity tools brought us in the past, it's was never more free time, just more work. It's in the name, after all...
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