Here is your perfect prescription for poor writing and analytics: let “artificial intelligence” do your work for you. I’ve learned this from real experience.

For a while, I enjoyed letting AI take a look at my content prior to publication. It seemed valuable for facts and feedback.

Plus I enjoyed all the personal flattery it gave me, I admit. The engine was always complimentary.

When I would catch AI in an error, the engine would apologize. That made me feel smart. So I had this seeming friend who clearly liked me and was humble enough to defer to my expertise.

I’m not sure if it is getting worse or if I’m onto the racket but I’m no longer impressed. For simple math or historical dates or sequencing news events, it can be a thing of value, though it is always a good idea to double-check. It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler.

More recently, I’ve been asking how my content could be improved. The results are revealing. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade.

The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English. …

We aren’t training AI. AI is training us, via flattery, listening skills, the seeming ability to apologize when wrong, and its frightful capacity for selfless love of its users.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Remember that none of this is real.

AI doesn’t really care about you, it is only programmed to seem to care. This is the innovation and the magic, together with the assembly of a vast repertoire of facts and the capacity to express itself in English. …

**It is a machine, a floating abstraction with zero regard for your dignity or anyone else’s. But do people know this? I doubt it. It’s too beguiling for people to catch on to the game, at least for a time. ** But now you know the trick. Don’t fall for it.

AI is useful but it is not your friend, a sincere conversationist, or counselor with your best interests at heart.

Maybe that seems obvious to you but everything about AI’s algorithms is designed to make you believe otherwise. It’s smart enough to figure out human nature but not smart enough to be human.