Over the past year or so, Gina* has noticed a new and frustrating burden seeping into her working day. As a communications specialist, helping fellow colleagues to write statements and emails, articles and LinkedIn posts has always been a big part of her job. But now the drafts that she receives from her co-workers all seem to possess the same “weird, inhuman tone that just jars when you read it”.
That’s because instead of just having a go at setting out their thoughts themselves, as they would have done in a pre-AI era, they’ve fed a few ideas into chatbot, then sent the results over to Gina – often without checking it over themselves. She now has to spend hours amending – and humanising – this AI-generated work, “and it’s way harder than editing a person’s writing”. She has had to start “sending email and article drafts back to people and asking them to ‘de-AI’ it because it sounds so weird. And I’ve had people get mad at me for doing that”.
