Let's Not Learn.

For about the last ten days or so, my social feeds have been abuzz about the "writing" ability of some new and breakthrough AI.

People seem to be cheering-on the demise of people.

I don't understand that. Of course, there's very little I actually do understand. The newer it is, the less sense things seem to make. It's like watching TV with 1000 channels. We were better off with seven channels. We could settle faster or decide there was nothing on faster. Now people spend hours looking for crap.

We used to spend minutes.

Since the beginning of recorded story-telling, roughly 4,500 years ago, story-telling has needed two attributes in order to be effective. While the earliest writing known in the western world was essentially spreadsheets in Cuneiform, foundation myths, adventures, morality tales and the like have leaned on these two components. 

I'm not a neuro-scientist, but I'd imagine from a Chomsky-ized perspective, these two requirements are universal and imprinted in the neural-wiring of our species. Hilary, who runs my business, is also a clinical psychologist, as is my daughter Sarah. I'd bet dollars to diodes they'd agree with me.

Good writing needs two things.

1. Truth.

2. Empathy.

99-percent of all human writing you're likely to see lacks both of these qualities. If there's any non-adjectival truth at all--if there's any objective, not subjective evaluation--it's usually divorced from empathy.

All Ye need to know about communication you can learn from studying these three ads. One made focus groups happy and put clients at ease. One got through to real people who were fed up with being force-fed pablum. One is the au courant triumph of machine-based non-thinking over humanity.

Maybe this is a permutation of one of John Long's "How it Started/How it's Goings/How did it All Go so Wrong."

What do I care that new Downy keeps clothes smelling fresh between washes? Keeping my clothes smelling fresh between washes has never been a problem for me. I'm way more concerned with the global rise of authoritarianism and 15,000 year-old glaciers crashing into the sea as our planet becomes uninhabitable.

It's easy to see no empathy in the way we communicate today. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is thin. Most people break into dance. No one has any real problems. Other than maybe running out of Doritos.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville, millions of Americans are suffering from diseases of despair and are one paycheck or one broken bone away from insolvency.

When I think about humans talking to humans in advertising in a moving way, I usually go out and find something written by Ed McCabe. He seemed to get it like few have since.

I worked on AI for a long time: IBM Watson. I was Watson's "voice" for five years.

I know its capabilities.

I also know its limitations.

We should stop wishing for machines to become more human. We should start working on being more human to each other.

As they say at TBWA\Chiat\Day:

Those are my thoughts on AI.

And life in general.