Ink

Communication: Why Bother?

The age of artificial intelligence is here, and it looks just like the age before it, only duller.

Most of what we read or watch has always been slop. We have a word now to describe the artificially generated rubbish, but we should not let the popularity of the word “slop” make us too nostalgic for the human-generated rubbish that used to be the norm. If you have a pile of corporate memos from ten years ago (and you do not have such a pile, because you were not foolish enough to keep all the corporate memos you ever read), you can leaf through them and see whether you could honestly say that they would not have been better if they had been written by a machine. The bot would have spelled and punctuated them correctly; it would have come directly to the point instead of spinning its wheels in the muck of introductory blather for two-thirds of the memo; it would have divided the essential information into numbered lists and bullet points. The memos would still have been boring, but they would have been informative. You would not have wasted any time trying to figure out what they meant.

For simply presenting that sort of dull but necessary information, artificial intelligence is just about ideal. It is true that the presentation will be dull, but the bot’s work will be less dull than what most human writers would come up with, because the bot will not ask that one question that plagues most human writers: “How can we say that?” Instead, the bot will just say it, which is what the human writer ought to do but seldom does.

But if bots are better at conveying information than human writers, do we have any use for human writers? Should writers hang up their pens and look for opportunities in the fast-growing ditch-digging industry?

Not yet. It is easy to forget that conveying information is the least interesting thing good writers do. It does take a certain amount of skill to present information in an easily absorbed form, and the very few technical writers who have that skill are still worth more than bots, and in fact can be usefully employed in improving the first drafts that come out of the machine. But if you read because you enjoy reading, then there is something you miss in bot-made text. The best word for the thing you miss is probably “communication.”

The word comes from the same Latin term that gives us “common,” “communion,” “community,” and so on. What we love about good writing is the way it opens up another mind to us and connects us with other ways of thinking. That’s real communication: two minds sharing the same thoughts. Writing is telepathy by material means.

What we miss in the botslop is that meeting of minds. It is possible that we may not miss it forever. What we call artificial intelligence has developed with dizzying rapidity, and we have not come to the end of its development. We should not be so foolish as to take the limitations of the bots as we have them now for permanent principles that will always apply in the future. If the bots grow into real minds, we may have real communication with them. But for now, communication is something humans do. What the bots do can be described as conveying. They deliver information, and they are very good at packaging the information so that it reaches its destination safely. But if you want to read something for the sake of reading, you still want communication. For now, communication is still a human thing.