Most of you will assume that by the selectivity, the sheer dogged opinionatedness that you find here, with occasional rashes of sarcasm, it would be one heck of a bot writing this.
Unfortunately for my free time, that bot hasn’t been created yet.
So here’s my personal Eight-Point Writers Guide to How You Know TTA‘s Not AI Authored.
- Selectivity. I write extensively on topics that intrigue me and hopefully intrigue you. I give more emphasis to companies that have a) breakthroughs, b) deserve attention for a variety of reasons, c) by their business move markets, d) fit into a trend that I’ve spotted.
- If it’s lifted from a press release or another article, it generally is closely paraphrased with ‘according to’ or put into quotes. That used to be taught in writing courses.
- I do try to connect dots I see. Yes, I get it wrong, sometimes. But I don’t go into outer space, where AI goes.
- A tendency to be Cassandra. I’m too cynical to be a cheerleader anymore, having been a part of the Hype Curve of Health Tech from 2006. Also, Doom frankly makes for a good lede. Part of my desire to write here is to warn busy people in health tech of the many Scylla and Charybdis that populate healthcare and health tech today*.
- The occasional busted grammar and misspelling. I do use tools that flag obvious misspellings. I’ve found Grammarly useful but intrusive, trying to flag and rewrite, sell me on paid, and turned it off as a result. Some of this comes out of re-editing what I wrote at 11pm the previous night. I try to clean up my obvious messes, subject-object agreement, and fractured phrases.
- Since I’m American (if being from NJ counts), I write in American English, such that it is. I like certain British turns of phrase, though I don’t use ‘redundancies’ when people are laid off or fired. When I was writing my thesis for my university London Semester Way Back When, my advising professor** instructed me, when I asked the question, to stick to American English and to note source material quoted from UK sources. I also worked with many Brits, Irish, and Australians in my travel industry years (as well as Editor Emeritus Steve here), so some of it rubbed off.
- Real anecdotes that have an eventual point. If you see the occasional red MD-80 or 737-300 on these pages, I’m hearkening to my three-plus year ‘graduate school’ as ad manager of New York Air. The ‘wild west’ of airline deregulation, the airlines that started up in that time, the larger than life founders, including their involvement with government regulation, have many lessons to teach to the founders of the new ‘wild west’ of AI companies as well as those attempting to serve or buy from them. Most of us in healthcare lived through other boom/busts: Dot.Com, the Hype Cycle of early telehealth and health tech, and the barely-past-us Crazy Covid Telehealth Money. Not learning from what we lived through leads to mistakes in the business present. Lord Acton phrased it better, though.
- AI Slop has no sense of humor. Even painful humor.
Now what got me all cranked up here was a far more succinct view of AI Slop Writing, sent to me by Editor Emeritus and Founder of this website, Steve Hards. An editor’s guide to spotting AI writing by Alys Denby is published on her Substack/website, CapX. We are drowning in it, especially if you like to hang out on YouTube for airliner/ATC and history videos. Her guide is simple, easy to follow…and once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. Key points she brings out: rhythm, e.g. too even paragraph length; the overuse of short sentences; repetitiveness; too much passive tense; ambivalent constructions; ‘not this but this’ negative parallelism; too many transitional phrases; and a certain hollowness -‘banal generalizations’. I’d sum it up as the feeling that you’ve just read cotton candy.
Detection tools you can use: GPTZero, Pangram, and even Grammarly (paid). Just a few, not a recommendation. And yes, they are AI too. Kind of like white hat/black hat in cybersecurity.
Most of all, you can read and support authors who write their stuff in both news media and for your company. The use of AI for research is now common, but what’s essential is using the same critical review you’d use in any other research.
- Use Real Human Writers for your company materials. Use real marketers for your planning who listen to sales and your customers. They can use AI to research, refine, and streamline production. Like any other tool.
- Limit the amount of AI Slop Writing you use on social media. It’s filler. Cotton candy. It doesn’t present you well.
- And use Real Graphics Designed by Real Graphic Designers.
And remember….even Pepper fainted from the stress!
*Scylla and Charybdis are the mythological (?) monsters guarding the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy. Appropriate as my maternal ancestors were from that part of Sicily.
**Sir Patrick Duffy, Labour MP, Sheffield Attercliffe, Royal Navy veteran WWII, Brexiteer, RIP aged 105 in January. Had I but known. Guardian obit
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