“I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Following is a guest post from our friends over at Long & Short of It, masters of ideation, customer insights and market research. They like to say they “dig and find lots of data and then turn it into actionable insights.” Following is their guest post.
Amazing how this quote from an AI assistant in the 1968 film (2001: A Space Odyssey) is now so relevant to where we are today. As if you needed another article on AI and the impact on marketing, writing, or quite frankly, anything else in your life. Love it or hate it; it’s here, it’s not going away, and it’s up to you to decide what or how to leverage the technology.
Most of our work falls into four categories: advising, thinking, creating, or writing. And writing can be lonely—anyone who does it knows that feeling. AI can help here if you decide to go down the path of not 100% human developed content. It can be used simply as a thought starter, a copy editor, or a way to bounce around an idea to get a different perspective. But there is that slippery slope—at what point is AI doing the writing or thinking for you? That’s probably for each of us to define.
And now for some full disclosure, the above was 100% human written. Curious how AI defines its own role in writing? I asked ChatGPT whether there are defined standards for AI-generated content. Here’s what it had to say:
There isn’t a universally accepted or predefined scale that categorizes writing by its degree of AI involvement—from completely human-generated to entirely AI-produced. Instead, what we see are evolving guidelines and best practices in different industries:
- Continuum of Use: Most discussions frame writing on a continuum. On one end, you have writing that is entirely human-produced; on the other, work that is fully generated by AI. In between, many pieces are the result of a collaboration where humans leverage AI tools for idea generation, drafting, or editing.
- Industry-Specific Guidelines: Different sectors (such as journalism, academia, and marketing) are beginning to develop their own policies. For example, some academic journals now require authors to disclose any use of AI in their writing process, while media outlets are debating transparency standards for AI-assisted content.
- Emerging Standards: With rapid advancements in AI writing tools, there’s growing pressure for standardized disclosure practices. However, no consensus exists yet on a formal “level system” similar to frameworks in other fields (like the SAE levels for autonomous vehicles).
Human here again. AI did a decent job as the information is relevant, organized, and sufficiently to the point. Though it is too academic in tone, and this is not how we write at L&SOI (though, AI can be taught tone).
The lesson from 2001: A Space Odyssey? When you hand over too much control to AI, things don’t always go as planned. So, where is your comfort level? At what point or through what prompt do you believe you crossed the line from it being truly your thinking and writing to something that you let AI run for you?
