I think “communication skills” should really be thought of as two separate sets of skills.

There are the “hard” communication skills, which are easily visible and which I’m going to call “expository communication skills”. These are things like being articulate, being able to write coherently, being good at public speaking, etc.

Then there are the “soft” communication skills, which I’m going to call “collaboration skills”, which are all about having the ability to understand and influence and compromise and work with other people. These are largely invisible.

One thing that is really starting to bother me is how it feels like we’re supposed to default to asking AI for help these days instead of asking an actual human. Every once in a while, when I ask someone a question, instead of the person answering me themself, they tell me “I asked AI and got this” and forward me some AI-generated answer. I find this frustrating for two reasons, the first being that it feels like a condescending insult to my intelligence. I am perfectly capable of typing my own questions into a chatbot and reading the answers it produces. But the second reason is that if I ask someone a question, it’s because I want to hear directly from that person. I’ll often deliberately ask multiple people the same question so that I can get multiple sides of the same story.

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Okay so here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out for a third time to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.

I’m starting to think that maybe essays and poems are two sides of the same coin, where they’re both attempts to explain things, but an essay is what you get when you follow a thread through to the end, and a poem is what you get when you can’t quite isolate the thread and you don’t know where it ends.

I think fiction has a slightly different purpose. It’s for the things that need to be expressed but probably shouldn’t be explained outright.

I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend where we’re letting these AI companies convince us that we can use these systems to streamline our lives by flattening the complexity out of them, as if our problems are a standard dataset we can summarize our way out of instead of this massive nightmare jumble of causes and effects we don’t always see and that we definitely do not understand.

And I find it paradoxical how the word “context” has become so associated with the use of LLMs when context is precisely the thing that they are stripping out of our lives. Knowledge isn’t supposed to exist in a vacuum; it’s supposed to be developed through being in conversation with other people and their needs and with the real world and with other knowledge, and it is through the specificity gained through that kind of conversation that information becomes more meaningful. We act as if this act of seeking and internalizing context is grunt work that should be offloaded toa machine in order to make room for the real work, when it is, in fact, the real work.