“How can we be sure this is the conversation we are actually having – or actually had?” asked the chairman of the insignificantly sized investment company TwoHoots Asset Management when we caught up the other day. “Oh dear,” I thought. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of us lost it – and no-one can say we haven’t had a good run.” Out-loud, though, I asked: “Is this a Matrix-type thing?
“Whatever colour pill you just took, I suggest you don’t take any more.” “Yes, yes – jolly amusing,” sighed the chairman. “What I mean is, when you come to write up whatever conversation we are about to have – as you always seem to do, albeit rather less regularly than in the past – how do I know you won’t use ChatCGT or whatever it is to whip up something artificially intelligent instead?”
“You mean, apart from you already being well aware of my deep-seated Luddism towards a technology I view as a creeping death sentence for the profession I know and love and for which I still occasionally manage to claim expenses?” I huffed. “Well, let’s start with the basics – when you come to read my next piece, you certainly won’t see any of the standard AI giveaways.
“So there won’t be any of those giant dashes that are the preserve of American writing – only nice medium-sized ones – and, similarly, you won’t see any Oxford commas loitering ahead of the ‘and’ in any list of things or adjectives.” “Ugh – quite right too,” grimaced the chairman. “Although, of course that may simply suggest some adequate editing skills on your part, not an absence of AI.”
Rapacious elements
“True enough,” I conceded. “Although I would counter that the sort of people who are lazy enough to get AI to do their writing for them …” “Surely you mean, ‘the sort of people who are hugely busy or perhaps a bit insecure about their writing skills’?” the chairman interrupted. “Quite so,” I nodded. “Those sorts of people are going to be too la … sorry, busy or insecure about their grammar skills to edit out those telltale signs.
“There are other giveaways too – like one too many adjectives or adverbs in a phrase; or, something I noticed recently, a not wholly relevant and possibly iffy quotation from a familiar-sounding politician or philosopher randomly thrown into the middle of the piece.” “I’ve heard semi-colons are another sign,” said the chairman. “No,” I disagreed. “As Anthony Eden famously said, they are a hallmark of grammatical excellence and clarity.
“Anyway, you have a cheek suggesting I would use AI in my writing. I know the more downmarket and rapacious elements of the publishing world see it as an excellent excuse to cut back on inconvenient things like salaries – replacing informed journalism with copy that wafts gently from press release to website, untouched by human hand – but what about His Majesty’s financial services sector?
Pernicious circle
“With its obsession with cost over value, how much marketing material now begins life as a question to ChatGPT? What percentage of client reports are AI-generated – and barely revisited afterwards? How many opinion pieces are sent to newspapers and magazines that are purportedly penned by wealth and asset managers but in fact were once no more than a glint in a Gemini?
“I’d say it was only a matter of time before PRs start using AI to create marginally different versions of articles for different publications so they can claim they are all ‘exclusive’ – except I am 99% sure that actually happened to me the other week. Let’s face it – we are now in a world where HR departments use AI to whittle down job applications and CVs increasingly created by you-know-what.
“More and more, those AI-selected professional investors will use AI to communicate with their clients, who may themselves use AI strategies to direct their money. Meanwhile PRs will direct AI-generated content to publications that inevitably become less and less read – except by AI companies scraping the web to train baby algorithms.”
The chairman and I sat quietly for a while. “Oh yes,” I said eventually. “One last way you can tell if something is AI-generated is the lack of a decent punchline.”
“How much marketing material now begins life as a question to ChatGPT? What percentage of client reports are AI-generated – and barely revisited afterwards?
