This all-pervasive wave of everything-must-be-AI frenzy is beginning to grate (rather than being great). Amazing as the technology is and I am a huge fan; I can’t help but feel we are losing something as we push toward using AI to cut corners. I am doing me best not to have a pop at anyone specifically, because the problem is far more widespread than any single web site, forum, blog or the organisations that run them, but I do need an example to make my point.
For many years now, I have been subscribing to the Collab365 Pulse newsletter which gets pushed out once or twice a week. I loved this newsletter because it somehow harvested M365/SharePoint blog posts from a wide range of sources including those from official Microsoft sites or course but far more interestingly from an eclectic collection of SharePoint professionals who do real work with customers every day.
I confess to being a little frustrated because try as I might, I could find no way of getting my eclectic collection of articles to be included in their harvesting process. I even resorted to emailing the team to enquire about their submission process but sadly no response was received ☹
But that’s not my gripe. My issue, and the purpose of this post, is to explain why (in my view) the owners/managers of this previously enlightening and invaluable knowledge repository, and so many others like it, have lost their way.
You see, they have fallen into the trap of enlisting AI to do the donkey work of collating, harvesting and summarising the content now pushed out in the newsletter. I totally understand the appeal of this as I can see that it would save hours a week because no one now needs to read (or even scan) the source articles and make any kind of value assessment as to whether they are relevant, worthy or valuable, because now AI can generate an abstract and so the review process (if it even happens) becomes one of scanning the abstract and not the source article.
The result is a massive drop in quality because no one now goes through the content to determine whether a post is just yet another marketing push about Copilot more or less identical to the hundreds that went before it or if the article provides true value by being inciteful, innovative or just simply interesting to read.
In short, it has now become a waste of my time, and I have sadly hit the unsubscribe button. Where once I used to open the newsletter with anticipation and excitement even, now it has become just more spam ☹
It is such a sad demise and now leaves me with very few places to go if I want to read about innovating ideas rather than marketing hype.
Please reach out if you feel the same and maybe we can hatch a plan to work on a solution or just have a communal moan.