Representation isn’t sentiment, it’s mechanism. It flips a mental switch from “something other people do” to “something I could do.” When that switch doesn’t get flipped, we don’t just lose individual talent, we lose entire generations of potential and the perspectives they would have brought into the room. This connects directly to the AI training data argument: the room where these systems are being built has a representation problem, and the output will reflect it.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #4: People Can’t Chase What They’ve Never Seen)
 

AI doesn’t invent bias, it codifies it. When you walk away from the tools you don’t agree with, you leave them to be influenced by the people you disagree with most. Abstention isn’t neutrality. It’s choosing to be invisible in the algorithms.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #3: The Ethics of Staying in the Room)
 

Tone in AI prompting works because of how language models are built, not because the model has feelings about how you talk to it. Understanding the mechanism makes you dramatically better at using these tools – and helps you understand why the “cheat sheet” prompts people share actually work.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #2: Why Tone Works (It’s Not What You Think))
 

This is a transitional moment in time. We have introduced the world to narrow AI through LLMs and presented it as the final solution to our creative needs. It’s a leveling moment where anyone regardless of their skill in writing, art, programming can now become as capable as the average of us gifted with talent. Great artists will use AI to elevate their work. Art will go in new and unexpected directions. But what I want to talk about is the fallout.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #1: Luddite)
 

I’m always amused at conversations that lead into how a specific demographic has a special or implied, exclusive understanding about a specific communications technique. Just because someone knows how to upload a video to YouTube, this does not make them a Social Media expert (nor does it make someone an eCommerce expert because they sell doilies on Etsy).

For some people, today’s youth who knows how to upload a video to the Internet is akin to yesterday’s youth who used to help set the VCR. In each ones time they were both considered tech geniuses regardless of their actual skills.

As the adage goes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This applies to perceptions of any skills competency. Just because a person has an understanding of something you don’t understand, that does not make them an expert in a subject matter (and them being an expert in one aspect of a technology doesn’t immediately make them an expert in all aspects).

Bringing this back to the topic of communications. New doesn’t always involve doing something different. While the tools may change, the fundamentals have always remained the same.

Believe it or not, social media is just one of many tools available to achieve your goals and those old tools? Well, in some cases, they are still just as viable for communications as the new tools. Old is new. New is old. Rinse, repeat.