AI ethics gone bad – when clients hide the human skills they need to make their AI look good

It had to happen.

Last week I was contacted by a tech business and asked if I could rewrite the God-awful copy that their in-house AI had churned out.

I didn’t know these people and they only found me via a byline on an article I'd written for a different client, so it was a chance encounter. Now, I’ve been bitten in these circumstances before, so I didn’t commit immediately, I just asked them to send over the text that needed amending. They did. To say it was shit is a massive understatement.

I took a closer look at their business. They sell a basic LLM and the stuff I was sent was an indicator of the AI’s work they're flogging.

Hmmmm.

I called them back; “I can help you, but I have to ask, will I get a byline credit for fixing this or are you going to pretend the AI did it all?”

There was a long pause, then the guy said, “Er, well, we can’t give you a credit. This is a demo of our product, so we have to sell it to our customers like that.”

 “So you’re using a human writer to correct the mess that your AI has created and then you’re telling people that the bot produced everything?”

“Em, yeah, I suppose you could see it that way.”

I hung up.

Jesus H Christ. If it isn’t bad enough that many businesses don’t want to pay for creative skills anymore and an equal number don’t recognise the urgent need for quality content, now some of them are actually hiding the human skills they need to make their shitty tech look good.

Is this fraud, is this simple deceit or is this just the norm very soon?

First, businesses go big on technology to get rid of costly human labour. Then, they want to use some of that human labour to improve and sell more of the technology that’s destroying human labour? Isn’t this the snake eating it’s own tail? What happens when there are no human writers left because technology has made us all obsolete? Will it just be an ocean of third-rate bot-talk out there?

Let’s make a few things clear:

1.       You can’t expect humans to fix the deficient technology that will put them out of a job by making it artificially look better than it is.

2.       If you don’t understand the value of quality content, you’re not a marketer, you’re not a commentator, you're just another slop agent.

3.       The resistance to synthetic communications is growing fast. You need to decide which side of the table you’re on – honest and valuable or fake and disposable.

4.       You can’t get creativity equal to human-made quality out of a machine. So stop trying.

Final word

I use AI for backroom admin and sometimes for research. I don’t use it for ideas, editing or to write copy. My tone, my views, my swerve are what make my output unique. There’s no way an LLM can copy that because it isn’t me and it never will be.

If you want good ideas, solid strategy and writing that doesn’t read like a spreadsheet summary, you have to invest in human talent. That’s all there is to it.

Now, where did I leave my quill pen and ink?

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