Written straight from my head to yours – flaws and all!

Yesterday I received numerous emails pointing to various issues, challenges, action points – a typical day at work. Some of those emails were quite serious and required immediate action, others were logistics that need resolution, others were meeting invites and networking opportunities. Towards the end of the day, I realised that many of these emails had the same tone, the same feel, and the same approach to conveying the information. The personalised voice through tone, editing issues, approach, style, humour, informality, was completely missing. All these emails – from junior and senior positions; external and internal – could have been written by the same person. In some ways they were – they were all AI generated.

I do this too. I write the email and then put them into ChatGPT with a variety of prompts such as: ‘write this better’, ‘write this more professionally’, ‘soften my tone’, ‘write this with empathy’, ‘write this with more kindness’. For the last few months, I have been riding the AI wave in emails, reports, stats analysis, LinkedIn posts, etc. I have thought myself very clever!  It all sounds so much clearer, more professional, and the tone is exactly what I ask for. I am managing to get through a great deal of work in a fraction of time, speeding up output and delivery.

I am not naturally a great writer, even in writing this very short blog I am itching to use ChatGPT to ‘meat it up’ or ‘write this with better flow’ – but I will not. My brain works faster than my fingers, so I make numerous editing errors such as ‘bene’ instead of ‘been’ or ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ . I also come across as very blunt (in writing and in-person) which has, in the past, gotten me in trouble as the tone of an email is received in a certain way even though I may not have intended for that. This is a weakness that I am continually having to work on. AI has removed that work from me. AI has made me feel smart. It has made my emails appear professional; it has given a tone to my reports that is much better than before I used it. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for the uses of AI! This is something that I assumed is only positive. How can writing an email more professionally be negative? Or assisting with analysis of a survey? But what is eroding is our voice. Each one of us has a voice and a presence that is unique to us. All of us have strengths and weaknesses in how we show up in the world, and alongside those we have quirks and creativity that seep out whether we want them to or not. We are giving this away. As importantly, we are giving away the human journey of realising our areas of challenge. My mind leaps ahead at full speed and then my body must catch up; this is something I need to work on and literally force myself to slow down. AI just helps me speed up. It also helps me create the illusion that I am maintaining that pace. Your challenges may be very different to mine, but we all have challenges that we need to understand and work on.

There is something deeply disturbing taking place in our world. We are homogenizing. We are homogenizing our workplaces, our approach to professionalism, our idea of beauty. The many emails I received yesterday came from different genders, cultures, races, levels, ages – yet they felt the same. Systems are becoming stronger with the objective being to make things work better. AI is being used in simple ways (as described here); and in more complex systemic ways; we are trying to look younger and younger even in superficial ways such as removing our grey hair, our wrinkles, and our body’s ‘flaws’.

In essence we are starting to idealise what robots are; what technology is. We are taking on the systems and approaches given to us under the guise of professionalism and perfection. Be faster. Be smoother. Be more profitable. Be younger. Be less emotional. Be one homogenised being.

The greatest challenge is that we are doing this of our own free will.

So…I will no longer be writing ChatGPT edited emails even though they are better. I will be writing in my voice even if sometimes I am called out, or there is an editing error. I will not be using ChatGPT to write my reports even though they take a fraction of the time. I will keep using ChatGPT to assist with certain components, but AI cannot have my voice – flaws and all! It amazes me just how dependent I have become in such a short period of time and how nervous I feel at taking this stance.

I only had a short time to write this, so it is by no means perfect. I also realise if I had put this into ChatGPT the blog would appear to be 100 times better, more punchy, more relevant to what others are saying. But it is human, and I want to hear more human voices in this digital world. We are amazing, not because we are perfect, but because we are complex, flawed, creative beings.

Don’t give that away!