Confluence for 8.28.23
AP guidance on AI use. Is the future of writing a lot like hip hop? AxiosHQ rolls out generative AI features. An AI for task planning and team coordination. The power of prompt libraries.
Welcome (or welcome back) to Confluence, our ongoing exploration of matters at the intersection of AI and corporate communication. Several items have our attention today:
AP Guidance on AI Use
Is the Future of Writing a Lot Like Hip Hop?
AxiosHQ Rolls Out Generative AI Features
An AI for Task Planning and Team Coordination
The Power of Prompt Libraries
AP Guidance on AI Use
The AP has issued formal direction on principles for the use of AI by its journalists, potentially setting a precedent for corporate communication.
The AP’s guidance tries to strike a balance. On one hand, they are (wisely, we believe) encouraging journalists to find creative ways to augment their work using AI. Whether it’s pulling together digests of stories for newsletters, revising individual sentences to make them tighter, or suggesting headlines, the guidance highlights a number of acceptable use cases for journalists. On the other hand, the guidance is clear that journalists should not use generative AI tools to create publishable content. See more details here.
One final thing to note. Amanda Barrett, VP of News Standards and Inclusion at AP, acknowledges a reality that we’ve recognized for some time: the landscape is changing rapidly enough that the AP plans review the guidance monthly and anticipates updating the guidance on a regular basis.
Is The Future of Writing a Lot Like Hip Hop?
Stephen Marche thinks so, and offers a thoughtful consideration of the intersection of AI and creative composition.
With the discourse surrounding AI and the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, we believe it’s worth thinking about the effects of AI on creative disciplines. Does AI change everything? Or does it change nothing? Stephen Marche’s answer is, well, both.
His point is this: AI is simply a tool, and tools can be used to create transcendent art that moves and inspires, or to create completely derivative dreck. To be a great writer, even one who uses AI, you still need to have a deep understanding of what makes writing great and be skilled with text. This rings true to our experience working with these tools. We’ve seen the best results when we think critically about the back and forth with AI, engaging the tool as a partner in the creative process and not just a content generator.
“The traditional values of creative composition were entirely alive during my process. That should come as no surprise. The transition from painting to photography required a complete reevaluation of the nature of visual creativity, but the value of understanding form and color, of framing, of the ability to recognize the transience of emotion across a face or a landscape—the need to understand the materials of production and the power of your subjects—stayed. None of that is going away. None of it will ever go away.”
AxiosHQ Rolls Out Generative AI Features
Plenty of internal communication platforms are integrating AI features. AxiosHQ is moving more aggressively than most.
AxiosHQ is all-in on AI, and it shows. From its launch, AxiosHQ has included AI features to help communicators write in Axios’ “Smart Brevity” style. Last week they announced plans to continue to add more AI-powered features, including Brainstorm for idea generation, enhancements to Smart Brevity guidance, and more. While we expect more applications to enter this space—including Microsoft 365 Copilot—Axios is aggressively pushing to establish a leadership position at the intersection of AI and internal communication software.
An AI for Task Planning and Team Coordination
Motion is an app that uses AI to time-block meetings and tasks in conjunction with each other based on timelines and importance.
The Eisenhower method meets time blocking meets calendar management. A new AI-powered productivity application, Motion, promises to increase productivity by 137%. How? By using an AI algorithm to prioritize (and re-prioritize) tasks and activities across teams and projects. While we have yet to experiment with Motion, we plan to explore its use cases for Marketing Agencies to determine its applicability and usefulness for corporate communication teams. Stay tuned.
The Power of Prompt Libraries
Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick is back with another excellent post, this time on the power of sharing expert prompts.
Ethan Mollick’s latest post in One Useful Thing focuses on the power of human expertise and best practice sharing—rather than custom models or fine-tuning—as the quickest way to unlock the value of generative AI tools. Using the analogy of grimoires (spellbooks), Mollick argues that the sharing and collection of expert prompts is just as powerful as custom-training a model with more and more data. Is your team or organization building your grimoire? Perhaps you should be.
With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise.
That’s it for this issue of Confluence. We welcome your feedback, and as we go, we’ll leave you with something cool for the baseball fans among our audience. Robot umpires won’t be coming to MLB any time soon, and this Jayson Stark piece in the Athletic goes deep (and we mean really deep) into why that’s the case.
AI Disclosure: We used generative AI in creating imagery for this post. We also use it selectively as a summarizer of content and as an editor and proofreader.