For communicators, AI will be truth’s new frontier
The great thing about being in the twilight of career is that being replaced is either imminent or has already happened, perhaps without you knowing it. The big question today is ‘by whom or what?’ Will it be ChapRIP or ChatGPT? It matters not at career’s end. If Chat leads a coup and overthrows Chap, it’s just the algorithm of life.
My career traversed everything from clunky mechanical typewriters that delivered incomplete lettering and early onset finger osteo, through Wang word processors, Netscape’s domination of a nascent internet and life-enabling apps. I bent and moulded, but didn’t break. Adaptability was the lifeblood of those who survived and thrived and those sifting the ruins looking for carbon copies of the careers they once had.
Artificial intelligence in all its forms will change but not destroy opportunity, as have previous iterations of technological change. It will affect some jobs more than others. Ultimately, it will affect all of us and transform the world at a greater rate and more fundamentally than anything that has arisen before.
In this context, there is always fear and anxiety. But the net outcome of artificial intelligence - good or evil - will not be a product of the technology itself, but the imagination of those who design and deploy it. It could extend life or curtail it, enrich us or impoverish us.
Workplaces and careers will simply transform as a subset of the whole. The intelligence, human and artificial that is replacing me will reboot the way we communicate. As the internet tore down or diminished once all-powerful media empires, it transformed the way we did public relations forever. There are many thousands fewer journalists than even a decade ago, but many more corporate communicators, many of whom specialise in just a few of the disaggregated array of media channels that need to be managed.
Communications teams are amalgams of multiple skills and experience, drawing expertise that ensures both depth and breadth in meeting the demands of streaming real information into an ocean of disinformation, distrust, partisanship and activism.
The demands on communicators will spiral upwards in the era of artificial intelligence. More disablers will be more enabled to manipulate ideas, ideology and purpose, morphing sound and vision with a few strokes of the keyboard - or simply on voice command.
The assets put most at risk by AI are not our jobs or roles, but those far more fundamental to the foundations on which human relationships and society must be built - truth and trust.
Skilled communicators will acquire and exercise a different array of skills and tools, using AI to augment their intuition, insights, craftsmanship and humanity to promote authenticity and defeat the pretenders.
Photo: Cash Macanaya on Unsplash