Are You Using AI? - We Are!

Back in the internet dark ages, Steven Roy Management, CCSR, Inc, and Cambyses Advisors were WAY ahead of the digital office technology curve. By 2001, we had eliminated 95% of the paper that a management and tax, private equity, advisory firm was presumed to require. We were also well on our way to 100% remote workdays, work from anywhere, and systems to facilitate them. Man, we were cool!

But Now, there is generative AI.

I can’t help feeling overwhelmed – Not by the tech itself, but by all the apps and database sources that seem to multiply like topsy - far faster than we can absorb them and determine whether they are worth the money and bother. We’ve waded through a plethora of planning, administrative, office, sales, prospecting, and accounting-reporting tools that often have us asking “Why did I pay for That – I can do This myself.”

Nonetheless, we find ourselves on the verge of completing our second generative AI based research project. It turns out that a much maligned  “glorified autocomplete,” or “stochastic parrot.” generates really good and reasonably comprehensive bullet lists! Just the ticket for the kind of research we do – reviewing lists of performance factors, finding patterns, and concocting responses to them. All four of the Gen-AI, LLM, ML models we use do a really good and thorough job! They even remember things that we’ve forgotten – which when you think about it is exactly what should happen.

The prose that AIs generate is another story entirely. Stodgy, turgid, awkward, and easily recognized as machine written. It’s enough to make Strunk and White (and possibly S.I. Hayakawa) turn over in their graves.

I once wrote a guidebook for planners that identified my Business Plan Pet Peeves. AI prose nails almost every one of them. Persistent use of passive voice (which lets someone or something else take credit for what you do); Run-on and compound sentences with so many subordinate clauses you forget what they were originally about; words that end in “ing” and “ally or ly” that string the sentences together; extraneous modifiers (too many superlatives, adjectives, and adverbs), and gratuitous appositions. They make me weep for English Lit teachers everywhere…

And would someone please teach AI about the alphabet (or some other ordering principle)!

Hey, if you need me – I’ll be cutting and pasting like crazy…

Hope we made you laugh – at least a little.