As AI becomes more common in clean energy marketing, it’s important to evaluate its effectiveness. This isn’t just about metrics – it’s about understanding what it takes to change people’s minds.
Most people can tell the difference between AI-generated and human-created content – even unconsciously. AI-originated text is recognizable because it sounds hollow, dull, as if an essential element is missing – like a soul.
AI-generated content presents conclusions through a set of facts. These facts are typically (though not always) referenced in the content in a quippy tone intended to elicit an emotional reaction. The thing is, we can read between the lines.
Of course, facts alone don’t usually change anyone’s mind. We have to draw our own conclusions – a multi-faceted, often messy process that’s highly individualistic.
NY Times Columnist Ezra Klein has devoted hundreds of hours on his podcast interviewing AI experts, asking probing questions of technologists, psychologists and philosophers about the long-term implications of AI. One of his conclusions is that time spent “grappling” with a topic is crucial for facts to “stick” – and actual learning to occur.
“The time you spend with things is pretty important,” Klein says. “There’s something about your process of grappling with [a text] that integrates it into the way your mind actually works.”
Grappling involves making connections that will only happen by processing information directly, and integrating that understanding into our own consciousness.
Writers are natural grapplers. The process of writing is akin to finding your way through the woods without a map – and this discovery process naturally transmutes itself into the writing.
Your reader will sense that you have grappled. You have wandered through the tangled web of information laced with human experiences and found your way out – by thinking, analyzing, and connecting with the thoughts, experiences and insights of other human beings.
This is when writing becomes persuasive.
Compelling, meaningful content isn’t a collection of words and facts, algorithmically arranged. It’s a doorway into the way humans think.
As the great philosopher and psychologist William James once said: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
AI is terrific at rearranging prejudices. But has it come up with an original thought on its own, based on its experience as a sentient being with a lifetime of thoughts and experiences layered upon one another over years?
Let’s grapple with it. As we head into RE+ in Las Vegas – the center of all deep thought –AI will be a topic of much discussion as we debate the growth of data centers and their resource implications. If you’re headed to the show, reach out and let’s meet IRL – for a conversation that may just blow our minds.
