How many times this week have you seen the phrase, ‘why this matters’ or ‘they said the quiet part out loud’? If you're on any social network anywhere, you will be inundated with lengthy posts in staccato form, featuring many breaks, clipped sentences and all parroting the same phraseology.
This AI style is designed to add quasi-emphasis or indicate the importance of the topic in hand to the person generating the post - and it will be a generated post. The danger we face is the commonplace embedding of AI linguistic patterns that are affecting our speech patterns, the way we engage, the way we create shared meaning while, at the same time, diluting the very meaning we seek to share.
I've been thinking about this and working on the puzzle it presents for a long time and, as you know, I’ve run countless sessions for writers over many years. Write Here, Write Now was a favourite as was Words that Work and my current session, Storytelling for Humans, addresses the issue of words that do and don’t work due to the influence of AI. Beat the Bot does this too but in a slightly more competitive way.
The problem with AI-generated copy and content isn't so much the repetition which, to be frank, is just dull. The problem is the rhythm. And that sent me all the way back to one of the best entertainers of the 50s and 60s, Sammy Davis Jr. and the great song, The Rhythm of Life, currently playing on loop as I write and which I hope I've successfully embedded here, because I think it will brighten your day.
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When we're presented with AI-generated copy, what's missing is the rhythm that hits your heart. We don’t want a rhythm of predictability, as what we are after, as people, is the rhythm of life. The unique human way that words can switch us on, hit the offbeat, make us pause, help us to perceive something differently or just poke us in the ribs and get us to move.
Sadly, AI churn is everywhere, to the point where journalists and presenters are parroting the ‘why it matters, they said this quietly’ with each broadcast. These stock phrases affect our ability to understand - which is imperative - and drastically affect our ability to engage.
The language of AI is slowly, and in some cases maliciously, roping us together with phrases that imprison our ability to express ourselves rather than freeing us to follow the natural human rhythm of speech and communication.
As Sammy sings:
“The rhythm of life is a powerful beat
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet
Rhythm in your bedroom, rhythm in the street
Yes, the rhythm of life is a powerful beat.”
That’s the beat that AI can't replicate because, of course, AI isn't human. AI has no soul and AI has no heart. AI is stuffed to the gills with training data based on biased, outdated Western linguistic customs - data that’s been dragged, kicking and screaming, out of US boardrooms, old TED talks and dusty corporate manuals, then forced into the tiny context window we peer at in our day-to-day lives.
As your reader, listener or viewer, when I encounter your words I want to see and hear you, not AI. If it's replicant, you are submerged in the noise of automation.
When Sammy Davis Jr. is singing “swim to daddy, dive to daddy, crawl to daddy”, it sharpens the focus on the cult of AI that we're being drawn into at the moment. The insistence by those selling the technology that, yes, this is the best thing that you could ever hope to have. Dance to our tune. Swim in our systems. Drown in our AI data streams. But their tune strikes a sour note. We need the unpredictability of language. We need unpredictable humans. We need word patterns that surprise us with false cadence so we know the story is not complete. We desperately need better human connections forged through a human weaving of words.
Next time you're thinking about generating new copy with AI, don't hand off your thought or idea to your model of choice. All that will happen is it will be whipped into the data sausage factory, stripped of your original thinking and spat out as slop. Your original thought will be lost to us. Your personality will be cloaked. If it's organisational content, the organisational ‘voice’ you’ve worked so hard to develop will be choked by the tightening grip of AI.
So choose the offbeat. Be unpredictable. Deconstruct and reconstruct. Be unexpected. Surprise me with your story. Let me see you.
And with that, I shall exit left, in the style of Sammy Davis Jr., singing ‘sock it to me, sock it to me’, waving my jazz hands in anticipation of celebrating your human way with words.