This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Zoe Hawkins, 40, who lives in Anthem, Arizona, and is the director of content marketing and thought leadership at Sumo Logic, a software company. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
In the last year or so, some of the content coming across my desk for edits has started to slip in quality. I began seeing stuff that didn’t fit. I would be like, “Did you write this?” They would say, “Well, I helped write it.”
I recently had someone hand in a piece of content that they had been sitting on for weeks. Before that, I had asked about it. “Oh, I’m working on it. I’m just sitting with it.” I said, “OK, take as much time as you need.”
Then I got the draft, and thought, “This was written in three minutes with AI.” I went through the version history of the document, and I could see that it just was copy-pasted in one go. Then, I could see the AI tells being edited out. There were things like weird mixed metaphors and a perfect three bullets for every example.
I thought, “This is not OK.” I am not going to wait for something and then I get slop. If I wanted slop, I would generate it myself.
I use AI, and I’m a believer that AI can be great and accelerate all sorts of good work. As managers, we need to figure out how to take people who give us slop and not just say, “You’re fired.” Because if we did that to everybody, we’d have no employees or agencies left.
How do you coach people on how to use AI effectively? We have to work with the humans who are working with AI to get better results, or we’re just going to lose our minds.
Did you read this?
I’m definitely seeing people lean on AI much more. I will sometimes get a document to review, and someone will say, “This looked really good to me.” And I’m like, “Did you read this before you gave it to me?” They’ll say something like, “Well, I had AI summarize it for me.” So, someone had AI write it, and you had AI summarize it. Am I the first reader of this document, including the writer and this reviewer?
As long as the thinking is still done by a human and isn’t outsourced, some of the grunt work can be done by an AI. You still need someone to read the final version and say, “Yes, that’s what I meant.”
I can Slack all day, but ask me to send an email, and I get anxiety. So, I’ll have AI read my email and I’ll ask, “Did I say anything awkward in here? Does this read OK?” Often, it’ll just be like, “You’re good to go. Hit send.” All I needed was a hype-AI.
Sometimes the AI will say, “You could adjust this to sound more professional.” But it doesn’t seem like me. AI is always going to suggest things to sound more like bland autocorrect — what it thinks is the average or the normal. You still have to have a moment where you say, “No, this is my voice. These are my thoughts.”
If I’m coaching people on using AI, I’ll say, “Talk me through your thinking.” That often makes them realize, “Oh, I didn’t actually think here.” Then they might reassess, “If I were to be writing this from scratch, what would be the things I would want to include?” I’m like, “Great. Let’s include that in your prompt.”
It’s really encouraging people to reclaim their own thoughts because otherwise, we all sound the same, and it doesn’t serve the business. I’m not creating blogs or case studies for fun. I’m doing it because there are goals and KPIs, and we’re trying to build a connection with our audience.
Learning new ways to give feedback
If I just said no AI across the board, people would be like, “Yeah, yeah, OK,” and then do it anyway. It’s really about saying, “We accept the fact that you have a tab open with your AI of choice. Let’s make sure you’re either using one with an approved model or one that has our brand guidelines built in.”
There needs to be a human in the loop at some point in the drafting stage and at some point in the editing stage.
I spent much of my career learning to give feedback to people’s fragile egos about writing. Now, everybody is super confident that they’re great writers because the AI wrote it. It’s a new skill to learn how to give feedback to people when their content was written by AI, or when their planning was from AI.
I’ll say, “I could ask ChatGPT myself. I want to know what you think.” Probably what will change the most in the coming years is how to manage people who are relying on AI.
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