#18 Who Wrote This? — AI Text and the Parts You Should Still Write Yourself
A while ago a business partner replied to one of my emails, and I knew within two lines that he hadn't written it. The phrasing was too smooth, too balanced, too eager to acknowledge my points before answering them. Even the formatting was too perfect: tidy paragraphs of near-identical length, a neat bulleted list, not one of the small irregularities a person leaves behind when they type in a hurry. Nothing about it sounded like him.
What surprised me a bit was my own reaction. The technology didn't bother me; I use it every day. I felt something smaller and more personal: that I hadn't been worth the minutes. Somewhere in his inbox my message had come up, he'd clicked "generate reply", skimmed it, and sent. The content was fine. The signal was: you're a queue item.
That reaction is the subject of this edition, because it puts a price tag on something we're all now doing. And the price isn't paid in the text.
Let me implicate myself
Before I go further, the disclosure this editio...
Becoming a Linkedin Top Voice / sawing off the branch I am sitting on
In German there is a saying “den Ast absägen auf dem man sitzt” - if you translate it directly it’s like: Sawing of the branch you are sitting on. Right now I have the feeling that I am doing so and that’s a bit of a dilemma.
I decided to contribute to LinkedIns knowledge community. It’s definitely worth checking out: (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/topics/home/). It’s basically a business knowledge “best of” that is written by AI and optimized by comments from LinkedIn human experts like me.
Hereby I can show my know-how, publish easily without the need to write complete articles and I can become a top voice in my field of expertise. Besides being positively labeled, the comments I am writing are helping me to develop and think about angles to tackle a problem that no one came up with so far - which is great. I also think that other experts are writing really good and read-worthy stuff.
BUT somehow I have the feeling that the community's knowledge is used to feed the big AI machine...
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Human Skills under AI influence: Which human capabilities become more important as AI takes over routine tasks – and how do you develop them deliberately?
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