Tiny Thoughts: Don’t let AI make you a lazy writer
Tiny Thoughts: Don’t let AI make you a lazy writer
Sorry, I am going to rant a little more about AI this week. Someone at work sent out a company wide email that you could just tell was a poorly written copy and paste from ChatGPT. I desperately wanted to DM this person and explain the following:
You are not clever for knowing how to copy and paste from ChatGPT.
You may think you’re being smart or efficient but all your lazy, poorly written email did was save you 5 minutes while it created more work for EVERY single person who had to read your wall of overly verbose text. Yes, you saved 5 minutes but thousands of people who had to read your poor writing paid the price.
Bad writing costs everyone else. It takes collectively way more time to read your crappy generated ChatGPT message. You may save yourself some work but by taking a shortcut you push that work on to everyone else.
Good writing can be assisted by AI but it still requires you to think, to do the work. Please don’t think you’re clever having AI do it all, it's noticeable and it hurts.
AI tools like ChatGPT are not going to replace the work humans need to do. They can augment, support, and empower us to be more productive and do better work. This colleague of mine took the lazy way out and it showed.
I am giving a talk next month on being an effective writer at work so this topic of writing well to respect your reader’s time is near and dear to me. I’m also thinking this will be the topic of my next book, albeit a short one now that the world is drowning in a sea of AI generated trash.