I just received an email from a prominent law firm advertising an upcoming seminar on the latest promises of a new generation of computing. Most business people would recognize the firm’s name, but of course we’ll not mention it here for fear of a gigantic lawsuit, or at least a C&D letter. (They’re LAWYERS, after all!)
The first paragraph briefly described the great power and many advantages coming with next-gen computing and ended with this sentence:
"It's impossible to understate the power this new form of computing will demonstrate." (Italics are mine.)
See the flub? It’s akin to that common mistake one hears so often: “I could care less.” I am pretty sure the article was AI-generated, for it had a plethora of repeated concepts, a lot of strung out phrasing, and plenty of word salad to get the count up to some stated goal.
This law firm doesn’t look so great when they blithely let grammatical mistakes like this one go unpunished. They meant “overstate,” of course, as they meant to say something like “You just can’t find the words to express how great the impacts of such power will be. Even if you guessed a billion times faster and a trillion times cheaper, you’d still be low."
We’re seeing these kinds of mistakes a lot in AI-generated text. That’s because a lot of the phrases pieced together by AI generators were concocted by flawed people in the first place. The generator sort of grabs words from a very deep bucket of goo and does a surprisingly good (but nowhere near perfect) job of making chicken feathers look sort of like chicken salad. What you get is a collection of thoughts that might come close to what you wanted to say, but it’s not quite there. As we’ve stated before in our blogs, AI-generated text is like that 70-year-old man sporting jet-black hair and beard along with all the expected wrinkles. You look at him and you just know something is off.
Are you using AI to generate press releases? Bios? Web pages? Do you dare to use AI to generate proposals? Well, if you do any of that, we’re here to help. Our experienced proofreaders have seen it all, and they know how to fix things. After all, it's difficult to overstate the harm of sending a proposal with subtle AI-generated errors to a major prospect. They'll wonder if you can really write or if you just pass things off to ChatGPT. And it's also difficult to overstate the importance of REAL intelligence when it comes to presenting your professional image.
We'd like to hear about your experience using AI to create content. Send us your comments.
