Some time ago, working for a company that was growing fast, I was asked to write an article to appear in a trade magazine.
That wasn’t my job, but they liked my writing and my know-how.
When the result was passed around the upper levels of the company and the sales team, some people loved it. But overall, it made senior people too nervous, and it was revised beyond recognition, with just the core message still retained for those who could detect it.
The problem?
“Other companies don’t say things like this.”
“It doesn’t sound professional.”
“This is not what trade articles are like.”
It wasn’t outlandish. The only bit I can remember of the opinion-dividing text was where I spoke about the problem in construction renovation where the customer wants things fixed securely to old material that’s more like breakfast cereal than anything solid. Actual readers would know the situation instantly.
As a piece of writing in its context, it stuck out.
Sticking out is good, we’re told. It’s what we should aim for. But we fool ourselves, often, thinking it’s what we want.
If you average a lot of photos of faces, something odd happens. The more faces are added, the more purely average the mix of them all becomes, the more people generally feel the result, while generic, is very attractive. What you might expect to be bland is actually beautiful.
The same turns out to be true of a lot of things, only we’re less likely to admit it, to ourselves or anyone else.
The arrival of AI chat and text generation has proved it. There’s something magic about all the world’s text, averaged out, and served back to us in chunks statistically estimated to be what we want. It’s bland, yes, everybody notices that except the most literal-minded or uneducated … but somehow it feels right. And that has a pull of its own.
It’s an insidious attraction when you need some writing that represents you in some way and will make you feel responsible, particularly. In that case it’s a big temptation to make it exactly what everybody would expect to see. It feels safe. So it’s what a lot of people do, and almost all committees and organisations do.
AI is not the problem here, it’s us. We’re social creatures, and you only have to look at fashion and trends to see that even our attempts to stand out are a form of fitting in.
It just so happens that we’ve invented a new tool that’s superhuman at exactly the averaging we’re so susceptible to.
In many ways very little has changed.
There never were very many people wanting anything really different anyway.