Friday, 9.47pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. – Edward Everett Hale
What’s going to make you stand out?
It looks like AI is going to take over the world. We seem to see new capabilities every day. It can write better than we can, make better poems, draw better pictures, create better videos and do everything faster.
Or can it?
I think we’re still trying to work out our relationship with this new machine. And perhaps the way to think about it is consider our relationships with earlier machines.
The car made the horse irrelevant but it didn’t remove the need for transport.
By making it easier to travel we ended up travelling more – but did that result in a better situation?
Define better?
It’s better in that you can drive further in a day than you ever could before.
But it’s also resulted in commuting, something that will ruin your health as you sit for hours every day and snack on chocolate and crisps.
Technology makes things different. And different does not mean better.
What we’re already seeing is a lot of auto-generated rubbish.
And it really is unreadable, some of this stuff, generic and vanilla and just plain boring.
Now that will change. The algorithms will work out what we pay attention to and fine tune content so that we’re drawn to keep consuming it.
But while it’s doing that you have time to react. And what you’ve got to do is lean into the “human” bits of what you do.
Here’s the thing. The only thing that’s worthwhile doing is providing a human with something to do.
Give someone a good story, a great experience, a thing they love.
I know that when I read something from a real person that I like it makes me feel good.
And when I read something good that has a whiff of AI generated stuff I feel a little cheated, a little like my trust has been violated.
I wanted to connect with you – not have a machine play with my neural circuitry and make me respond in the way it wanted.
No one likes being manipulated.
But we all like to connect and experience something real.
How should you respond?
I think technology is often a good thing. AI can help. It should definitely be part of your workflow and you should try and see how it can help you do better work.
But you’ve got to remember that in many cases there’s a person that you’re trying to connect with.
In 2024, if you want to succeed, one way is to make your service as personal as possible.
How do you do that?
There are three things to think about.
First, what is it about the way you do things that is inimitable – that’s hard to copy?
For me it’s the hand made approach to thinking that I use. It’s simple, a pencil and paper, doodles to work through ideas. The kind of thing that is literally generated by my body.
You can do it, but you’ll do it differently. An AI can do something but I’m not sure what without a brain to connect with it.
Second, make stuff people like. Make things for people. Don’t just create “content”. Create something a person wants to read or engage with because it has a part of you in it.
And finally, talk about what you do in simple terms – connect and teach others. Write about your work and why you do it.
That’s why I’m quite keen on watching how the search engine Clew works out. It’s a place where you can find real people writing rather than the auto-generated spam that the big technology providers are leaning into developing.
I’m hoping that there is still a place for a human approach to service.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 