#MeWriting Efficiency is the overriding goal for humans producing content today. AI is the perfect tool to drive it:
1. You, a human, provide an input to the AI.
2. The AI generates an output.
3. You paste that output into place.
4. You are efficient.
Notice that you, a human, are not only in the loop. You are in control of the loop. But most importantly, you are efficient, because you let the AI do the bulk of the work. Presumably, Step 2 will become less expensive and take even less time in the future, as hardware, AI, and task strategies improve.
AI developers can make you even more efficient by automating Step 1 and Step 3. You’re still in control though. Nobody who doesn’t embrace AI can match your productivity divided by time spent, a.k.a. efficiency. You have quickly mastered the efficiency side of the coin.
Wait, there is another side? Yes. The content your efficient process produces will be used by someone. That use is the Effectiveness Side of the coin.
To get your content considered on the Effectiveness Side, it has to grab someone’s attention. And then, to get it used as you intended, it has to be interesting. Notice what you are not optimizing for these on the Efficiency Side.
Effectiveness is currently a second-class citizen to efficiency for many people and within many organizations, especially those that are all-in on AI. Effectiveness is often hard to measure, with clicks and likes being crude but available proxies. Courage to prioritize effectiveness is hard to measure, as well.
To get actionable telemetry on the Effectiveness Side, you need to speak to your intended readers (or viewers). You need to ask them if they looked at your content and how closely they played attention. You need to listen for signs that they were or were not engaged with it, regardless of the word content of their answers. You need to accept a qualitative measure of the Effectiveness Side, because any numerical measurement will lie to you. How do you measure what’s inside your readers’ heads?
My recommendation to you is to prioritize effectiveness. Once you have found a good measure of effectiveness and your content meets or exceeds your goals, you can work on being efficient. Nobody cares how efficiently your content is produced if they don’t know about it to begin with.
People tend to be surprisingly effective content creators. AI and automation tend to be surprisingly ineffective. If you are relying on AI to be effective or more effective, the AI should pass two tests: (1) It should actually be effective, and (2) it should not rely on magic to be effective. You should be able to explain, from first principles of how AI actually works, how application of AI to creation of your content will be effective.
I’m tagging this with a new tag, “Branch Elbonian”, as a tribute to Scott Adams’ lifetime work on persuasion. I’ll explain the tag another day when I have more examples to draw from.
I would appreciate your reactions and comments on my LinkedIn repost.