The cost of outsourcing communication to robots
The long-term effects of GenAI on trust
When generative AI (GenAI) hit the scene, we all seemed to sense that it was unlike any technology that had come before — to a point.
AI wasn't a totally foreign concept. After all, we'd been living alongside Alexa and Siri for years in relative harmony (if you don't count the creepy eavesdropping).
But it was startling to see what even the earliest versions of ChatGPT were capable of. GenAI was creating. Some might argue it was creative.
Looking closer at the mechanics of it, however, you would find that it was actually just a "remix machine" that took human creations from the web and existing datasets, and predicted the best way to regurgitate that data back in different formats to answer user prompts.
But as GenAI models improved, so did the output. Soon, you couldn't deny the uniqueness of what the models produced.
As a communications professional and a creative, I found it worrisome. Not because I thought robots were replacing me — they weren't — but because I was having to face what communication had become: a means to an end.
And GenAI didn't create that problem. That problem existed before OpenAI was a glimmer in Sam Altman's eye.
The commoditization of communication was happening right alongside all the other massive cultural and sociological shifts of the 21st century. So when I came across this statement from a scholar in my research, it made me pause:
“What used to be Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is turning into AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC): interpersonal communication not simply transmitted by technology but augmented—or even generated—by algorithms to achieve specific communicative or relational outcomes.” (Jakesch et al., 2019, p. 1)
GenAI wasn't just upending how we communicate — it was communicating for us. And that has real-world effects on how communication — and the communicator — is perceived.
Consumer trust is tenuous — and no one seems to fully trust anything they see online anymore.
In one study I uncovered on trust erosion, the authors draw a line between the behaviors of an industry and consumer trust:
“Consumers are concerned not only about their pragmatic needs but also about the appropriateness of an industry’s activities and its members’ cognitive beliefs that are more profound, subtle, and self-sustaining. Once consumers have established judgements of the industry’s institutions, they tend to apply their judgements to formulate trust-based decisions so as to avoid systemic risk.” (Shijiao et al., 2022, p. 110)
To put this in layman’s terms, customers care about the behavior of the companies they consider buying from — and when those behaviors are shady, customers use that information to judge how much they can trust a company, and whether or not they should buy from them.
Let’s extend this to communication:
If people don't trust what they read from a company, they can’t fully trust the company — and communication will not achieve the intended outcome.
If people instantly doubt the veracity of the communicator, audiences are unlikely to keep listening.
GenAI has become impressively good at creating content of all stripes — and it will continue to improve at this. But in the process, it has had an effect on trust. When audiences doubt that a human wrote something, or they doubt the intentions of the publisher or author, they’re not going to continue down that path.
They’re going to stop reading.
Effective communication isn't just putting words in grammatically correct order. The intention, timeliness, and spirit of the words matter greatly. AI isn't going anywhere, but there are more useful ways to deploy it than replacing something so fundamental to human relationships as communication.
Bibliography:
Jakesch, M., French, M., Ma, X., Hancock, J. T., & Naaman, M. (2019). AI-Mediated Communication: How the Perception that Profile Text was Written by AI Affects Trustworthiness. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300469
Shijiao, C., Zhang, J. A., Hongzhi, G., Yang, Z., & Mather, D. (2022). Trust Erosion During Industry-Wide Crises: The Central Role of Consumer Legitimacy Judgement. Journal of Business Ethics: JBE, 175(1), 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04588-0