Thoughts on AI and Tech Comm

Is AI stealing tech writing jobs?

For what it's worth, here are my thoughts on some AI trends in tech comm.

'AI is Coming for Your Technical Writing Job'

Is AI poised to replace me? Maybe, maybe not.

Personally, I have no idea what's going to happen in tech comm five or 10 years from now. I've been there, done that as a freelance editor in 2011, when the publishing industry was caught up in a similar AI frenzy and job panic. By 2015, the panic died down but the damage was done. The false promises around AI-generated journalism decimated the market for writers and editors. Technology prognosticators and their forecasts were partly to blame.

However, Tom Johnson offers some cogent thoughts on this Forrester Report with respect to AI-generated technical writing. Something to think about, though I'm not selling the condo or moving into my car just yet.

'AI is Like the Early Days of the Internet'

Sorry, but no it isn't.

The early days of the Internet came with a low barrier to entry. Anyone could buy a domain name, which were plentiful at the time, and publish a website. It was a less sophisticated but more democratized form of technology back then — before bigger players like America Online gobbled up digital real estate and built gated communities.

In the early aughts, "Web 2.0" (i.e., social media) became the next wave of gated community building. It created the illusion of democratization but really you were, and are, simply exchanging your personal data and privacy for big tech profiteering.

AI is more like Web 2.0 in that sense. For example, if you want to use a free add-on like OxygenXML's AI Positron Assistant, you have to agree to let ChatGPT 3.5 screen scrape your website for learning purposes.

AI also presents a high barrier to entry for those who want to develop it. Generative AI is prohibitively expensive to train, so only a few big players can afford to build their own tools. It's not like the mid-1990s when you could learn some HTML tags, hang out a virtual shingle, and start your own business.

Wary but Pragmatic

I'm also still wondering how to use AI for my job because our help documentation lives behind a login. In the current climate, using AI would mean exposing proprietary information to an AI tool's training model or public domain. That's a huge showstopper right there.

But I'm not against the technology per se. I'm testing it out on my own in order to better understand it.

I'm also studying for the Salesforce AI Associate certification — Salesforce is driving adoption of AI powered tools, so it will be interesting to see where things go and what opportunities arise.