AI Is Giving Us the Worst Game of Telephone Ever

‍

‍

Americans love our sugar. Sometimes, when eating fruit that isn’t too sweet, people will put a little extra sugar on it to sweeten it. Of course, if you let a six-year-old sugar his fruit he’ll dump a whole bowl on it and wind up with a stomach ache. A little is good, a lot will cause problems. Unfortunately, corporate executives aren’t that much different from six-year-olds, and they’re about to dump a whole bowl of AI on corporate communications.

To understand what they’re about to do, and how it’s going to go horribly, horribly wrong, we should turn to another childhood habit, the game of telephone that many of us played as kids. This is where a message is whispered from one person to the next and it gets garbled as it gets passed around. As kids, the fun is seeing how sillily the message gets changed. Corporate America is about to do the same thing, powered by AI. (What could go wrong?)

AI is a helpful tool when it comes to writing. In terms of words per minute it’s better than most humans. Need to write a report? AI can generate it for you (some, or even all of it). Have to send a big email? AI can help. The cost (meaning time) per email goes down, the quantity (number of emails and length of email) will go up. The unwritten rule of all jobs is to do more with less, so the siren’s song of AI is unavoidable. (If you have a management title, you’ve probably already noticed an uptick in the sales spam you’ve been getting, thanks to AI.)

For example, if you need to write up some strategy ideas, in the past you might have had three ideas of a paragraph each. But AI can give more additional strategy options and help flesh them out. Instead of three paragraphs, you now have three pages in a matter of minutes. Suddenly you look like a much more thorough worker!

With more emails (and other content) being sent and that content being longer, our inboxes will start to clog up and we’ll have less time to do things other than read the mountains of internal communication. Fear not, AI to the rescue! We can have AI prioritize and summarize emails. Who needs to read four pages of strategy ideas when AI can summarize and pick the best one for you? If you want to look smart you can reply-all with some AI generated thoughts and questions; voila, right b back to the original poster in the thread with another page of “deep” analysis which will no doubt generate yet another detailed, AI-generated reply. (Did I say telephone? Maybe it’s pong.)

Isn’t this great? So much wisdom, insight, and content, all from AI, with barely any human intervention!

There’s an old urban legend about early attempts to do computer translation where English would be translated to Russian and back again to English. Supposedly the machine turned, “The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak,” to Russian and then back to, “The vodka was good, but the meat was rotten.” (Snopes) While probably apocryphal, we can see the thinking behind it.

We know translation isn’t perfect and doing it twice just makes it worse (in what’s known as transmission chaining). Two people correctly communicating is hard enough as it is. We’re now putting two extra steps of “translation”—AI generating text and AI summarizing text—in between what would have been communication directly between two humans.

As with so many process or behavioral changes, we typically see a J-curve, where things get worse before they get better. Email and other electronic corporate communication are about to get a lot worse until we find a new equilibrium. Corporations should keep an eye on this, to make sure they don’t actually replace human to human communication with AI-to-AI communication that does as much harm as good.

‍