Anybody else noticing this? As an average person, I’m not complaining.
I still worry about the long-term cost of genuine human creativity being drowned out by synthetic noise. But there’s been one surprising upside. Over the past year, I’ve been able to start actual, ongoing conversations, often just by sending an email or making a phone call, with people I could never reliably reach before:
- State representatives
- VPs of engineering organizations
- Authors and bloggers
- Journalists
- European lawmakers
- Random experts who share similar interests
I spent the better part of the last decade trying to start conversations like these. My success rate felt like an anecdotal 2%. This year, it’s high enough that I almost expect a reply.
The difference isn’t that I’ve become a world-class communicator suddenly… My best guess is that human communication has become rare enough to stand out.
As more people outsource their voice, curiosity, opinions and personality to AI, the bar for sounding genuinely human has fallen… a lot. Those of us who still write in our own voice suddenly stand out far more than we used to.
I suppose it could also be that the AI boom is making filtering for human authenticity easier, or that AI drafts replies faster, or that people are becoming more willing to network. It’s even possible that my own writing improved (believe it or not, I actually typed this sh*t from my brain, for fun!).
Whatever it is… it’s an unexpected advantage whatever’s happening right now.
In the age of synthetic communication, being unmistakably human has become a competitive advantage.
Discuss on Hacker News.