The Split We’re Living With in the AI Age

Adele: 00:00

A contradiction that I think nobody wants to name. Maybe everyone's a little ticklish about it, and it hints to this tension between the side of people who run businesses and are interested in using AI to improve their productivity. And then there's the other side of the human that just wants authenticity.

Adele: 01:45

Something real, something connected. In this world, and not surprisingly, most people are a combination of both, and it depends on the context of the conversation, but I'm always drawn to the tension that's happening at the same time because both things are going on at the same time. And we may have perhaps more vested interest in one side of the house than the other.

Depending on the context. For example, people are using AI to help them write emails, to craft content, generate social media do all sorts of things that AI can do, and it saves a lot of time. It's fast, it often looks really great. And when people feel the pressure to produce a lot of stuff, to stay relevant in the world, to not be drowned out by the noise that I'm need to somehow let the world know I'm still here and I need to shout into the void myself.

Adele: 03:20

People often feel the pressure for a lot of content and oh my gosh, we can use AI to do that. Whether it's videos or audios or blogs or social media posts, poof. And this can be really useful. My perspective is that it works. Short term meaning it is if you are looking at quantity and even quality in some aspects, AI can be very useful for that because there is a need to, like I said, announce to the world that you're still here to still attract people's attention.

Because if you're a business owner, you've probably heard that we are now in an attention economy. That attention is the new currency for staying relevant. But I wanna also switch to the other side of the house, and this is the, what I feel is the more quiet, personal, intimate yearning that people feel inside when they are not the business owner, when they're just themselves and perhaps trying to make it through the day.

And. Waiting through the noise. It's directed at them through social media, everybody else's social media or the internet or the news, and unless you're hiding under a rock. You probably already know that there's a tremendous amount of curating and algorithm control or all sorts of filtering that's happening with almost everything you see.

Now that's content related, whether that's your news, your social media feed, and people are also noticing this in their email. In the content they consume by other people. And it's interesting what's happening. I know, I, I notice that my own trust factor of what I see and read and hear is dropping because we all know that AI is now creating better and better quality.

Content such that you can't tell if it was generated by a real photographer or an AI generator. You can't tell if it was written by a human. I think you can still sense something right now, but the tools are improving. So when you're in the business owner's hat, this seems delightful. Right. You can be three times more productive and churn out content that sounds like you.

But when you're on the other side of things, when you're just you and you are consuming this content from other people, many people feel the opposite reaction. In fact, the data has shown that when people feel like they are. For example, the data is showing that if you are served a bunch of content, and it may be fine, and you might actually say, this is pretty good content, whether it's a podcast episode, by the way, this is not AI generated.

Adele: 05:05

Or maybe it's a blog post and it reads fine. You may feel like this is pretty good until you find out somehow that it was AI generated. Then the trust factor drops, the satisfaction level drops, and this is where businesses need to be real careful about what's happening. Because the number one thing that's very difficult that everyone is trying to simulate, to curate, to develop.

To me it's not even attention anymore. It's trust. Trust is something that's intangible and it's a certain consistency of what you know about someone or from a business's perspective, it's about a certain consistency of performance, of messaging and all that. But on a human level, trust is knowing if something's real or not, and when that gets messed with.

It's no wonder people feel exhausted. They feel a dissatisfaction settling in even when everything looks fine. And so the data has also shown that if you are going to use AI tools to generate chat bots or whatever it is to answer people's questions, if you tell them. That they are engaging with ai, then people aren't nearly as upset that people appreciate the honesty of, oh my gosh, this is an AI agent that's helping me.

I can deal. It's only when businesses try to fool and make you think you're engaging with a real live agent. I think we've all been on. Online chat bots to solve a customer service problem, and you just wanted to pull your hair out because it was obvious it was a bot and you just couldn't stand it.

Adele: 07:00

You'd rather wait online to talk to a real human, and you're sitting on hold for 20 some minutes, getting more and more impatient. The latest bots are better, but they're not perfect. So businesses are trying to do the best of both worlds, which I think is great. That many questions can be answered through a bot and when a bot doesn't know, transfer over to a real live agent so that the customer feels supported and that's great.

When it comes to content, I think people are yearning for a sense of. I call this a signal that comes from an authentic expression of effort of energy, meaning people trust, they have a sense that they are valued if they know that the sender. Valued them enough to take time and energy, to write an email to, to correspond that it wasn't just written by AI in half a second, that they were valued enough that someone would take the time out to write them personally.

Recently, I was at a lunch with a bunch of girlfriends and the topic of AI came up. And a couple of these ladies were talking about their experience at work when they could immediately sense that their bosses had switched from writing their emails out personally versus using an AI agent to write the email.

Adele: 08:55

And they described a sense of. It wasn't a happy feeling. It was like, well, gosh, I know that he didn't really write this, and it sent out an ambivalent message that the boss couldn't be bothered and. Did the boss not think that people couldn't tell that the tone of these emails didn't sound anything like the boss?

And people would laugh like, this is so silly now, we can't even take the time to write each other. So I must not really be that important that you are trying to multiply your productivity by pushing a button to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing. In my assignment or whatnot instead of taking the time to write me yourself.

And there was this laugh of, well, this is kind of what's happening, but I noticed it wasn't exactly a happy feeling. It was a sense of, well, this is the way the world is working. But think about this for a second. If you're an employer, how would you feel knowing that your staff. Can tell that you don't really write your emails and that it sends out a message that you're not really worth the time.

Now, the number one impulse many employers I talk to will do is to try to improve the tone of their emails. And with the AI agents, I think it's becoming more and more easy to craft emails that might sound like you use. Use your mannerism, use your words. But it still creates this sense of distrust of what was real here in the correspondence especially.

But from the employee's point of view, this is coming from their boss, someone who has power and control over their livelihood, and employees already are very attuned to trying to feel into what their boss wants. And when this is obfuscated or somewhat made more complex by an AI agent writing things, it doesn't foster the support and the trust that employees yearn for in this chaotic world.

Adele: 10:45

|I just thought it was very interesting. That people said that they knew immediately when the boss really wrote them and when it came from a bot, even though it always was supposedly from their boss. And I wonder what it would feel like for you as we move into a world where more and more stuff becomes AI generated that depending on which side of the house you are, whether you are in your business persona.

Trying to find ways to increase your productivity to do more with less, which is what everyone is striving for to rise above the noise so that you don't just get covered up by the noise and not have any attention currency in the world. 'cause your business depends on that versus when you are at home as a human.

Trying to find and sniff the world for something that's authentic, something you can trust, something that's real and perhaps a cynicism is creeping in. When you hear about businesses claiming to be authentic with people and yet everything you read, you can sense on some intuitive level that it was probably AI generated.

You can see now why people feel ambivalent and. A little bit uncomfortable. What does this mean for us in the direction we're heading? Anyway, I just thought I would share this with you. As we move more and more into this new world, I'd be open to your thoughts. I personally do not use AI to write any of my emails.

Adele: 12:35

I use AI to do research sometimes suggestions for how to make something better. But I've made a decision that on this podcast and on the pieces that are meant for personal exploration, there's no AI here. It's always going to be me on the other side of the pod, the podcast that is a little bit more business oriented.

It's still me. It's still my voice. But in respect to people's time who might want something a little bit more organized, I'm happy to use AI to structure things so that people can receive my message in a bit more organized way. So I am doing both , letting you know so that you can feel out for yourself the difference in tone and experience.

So hope this is useful. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I.