Presenters:
- Neil Taylor, Director of Training at Definition
- Luke Budka, AI director at Definition
Yes, there’s an increasing, dispiriting amount of AI slop in the world.
But, there’s a lot of human slop too. If you work in a big business, you’ve probably been drowning in corporate blah for as long as you can remember – stuff that’s never been anywhere near an AI.
And for years, clients have asked us to help them produce ‘thought leadership’, and then when we’ve asked them what the thought is, been met with blank stares.
So when you train a language model on terabytes of that mediocrity, well, it shouldn’t be a surprise what it goes on to produce.
To stop the slop, you need what you’ve always needed to make an impact: an original idea; a feisty opinion, a genuine story, a new way of seeing the world, an idiosyncratic turn of phrase. In short: at least a little creativity.
That’s why I don’t have a problem with people – especially people who aren’t confident writers, or who are writing in a non-native language, say – using AI to knock their thoughts into shape, or challenge their thinking – as long as they’ve actually done that thinking. Or a business getting a great writer to create a brilliant prompt to perfectly capture a tone of voice, and then using AI to apply it to masses of stuff that writers and designers never normally get their hands on.
But, right now at least, AI needs humans. So if we’re going to stop the slop, it’s time to take a walk round the block, or a trip on the top deck of the bus, and do some actual thinking.
Written by Neil Taylor, Director of Training at Definition.
