Madagascar Trapping Buyers' Canary

@iamjasongibson

I can’t make this stuff up. #professor #highereducation #college #midterm

♬ Piano famous song Chopin Deep deep clear beauty - RYOpianoforte

All hail Jason Gibson.

There's a fast-sprouting trope right now of academics catching out students using AI on tests, coursework and exams. The above chap shines from this pursuit.

Solution Sales has already passed the tipping point here I feel.

For instance, I continue to holdout against being recorded on calls. Yet for all internal ones it's already mandatory. The leaps in transcription and reassembly of information captured are astonishing.

As a species, we are hard-wired to find shortcuts and workarounds. So when presented with a tool that can slash our typical production lead times, it is not going to be ignored.

I'm all in favour of this productivity boost. I am though distressed about the reduction in overall calibre of output I am seeing as a result.

Overall, I sense prospects are getting savvy to this.

Who knows how long this present window will last, but there is a kind of 'blink' filter. The hunch when something's not quite as it reads. For me, it's a blend of unnatural perfection and polished blandness.

There's the strange absence of slightly clumsy phrasing. Watertight grammar, without any ambiguity at all. Everything looks 'symmetrical'. Like the same formatting throughout, even down to bullet point clusters.

Then there's the itch that you can't quite make out a 'voice'. Is that really a salesguy, or some wizard corporate comms guru writing there? There feels just one-too-many a generic point.

The tech seems improving daily. So maybe these alarms are mere glitches which the Matrix shall soon fix. Recently I asked AIs what flags might help spot non-human prose. Of the fairly long list of words offered, I shuddered that three of them I use regularly; delve, realm, crucial. Yikes.

The obvious place to see this comes from RFPs.

Think of the (highly rewarded) seller that completes a forty-pager within the hour. Impossible, yet there it is. Imagine that salesperson dropping a prompt featuring;

“Write this RFP response in a natural, conversational enterprise sales style. Avoid corporate buzzwords like delve, tapestry, seamlessly, holistic. Use varied sentence length. Sound like an experienced salesperson, not a consultant. Include some imperfections and direct language.”

Yet for the Sales Manager, beyond that sheer speed of delivery, glimpses can be gleaned.

Is there missing nuance that only comes from actual proper contact?
Is there a dramatic and sustained improvement in written quality?
Is there over-egged weighing up of various options?
Is there a slight version of hallucination when it comes to describing our solution?
Is there any personal flair that comes from recounting actual experience?

One gnawing issue with AI produced work is that when everyone does it, we all sound the same to our prospect. Which is the killer for the one thing that ought set us apart. Our distinctive approach which makes us unique and what the eventual clients so happily buys into. We cannot lose that in the mush that becomes AI written comms.

Checks can be put in place. Explaining verbally certain sections. Applying the 'generic' filter. And when you've added or amended bot output for your own voice, make concrete note of it.

And if you take nothing else from this latest viral smash, know now you must check anything you receive from a prospect too. As I'm pretty sure they'll be inserting what is now being termed their own hidden AI 'canary' to gleefully catch our prospective vendors in this way.