by Bill Dall
AI is raising the bar on output.. and also helping people generate reams of unreviewed low-quality output. Both are happening.
In our daily lives we’re seeing more and more AI-generated content. Some of it is fun, but this also comes at a cost. It’s now easier to spread misinformation or disinformation quickly, and, more innocently, the ‘hey I can make an AI image of a chubby cat, or a dog on a skateboard or…’ was fun at first but the novelty wore off quickly.
Those first AI images that became memes reminded me of the late 90’s, when all of a sudden anyone could be an online publisher. And they did publish! People had new powers and there weren’t great standards for what was good and what was not. So a lot of cringy content was created. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. And even top brands were struggling to figure out how to make a compelling web experience. Look at Apple’s site (above) compared to today’s.
Here’s a fun graveyard of other web fails - some by major brands - in the late ‘90s. https://www.justinmind.com/blog/10-90s-websites-designs-you-wont-believe-existed/
We have come a long way as design guidelines and norms were created and followed, and better templates and tools were provided to creators. A modern website can be pretty slick. For people starting their business site or a personal blog site, the bar today is much higher than is was for a leading high-tech organization two decades ago.
The same will happen with AI - for key work deliverables the bar will rise and people will need to do more - provide better analytics, provide superior reports, provide more compelling marketing copy.
When thinking of AI at work and doing quality versus speed tradeoffs, we need to think of it as a ‘yes, and’ not an ‘or’ - we can’t just think of ways to reduce work or automate, we have to think of how AI can help make better decisions and improve communication.
There’s a tremendous opportunity for AI in workflows, improving the quality of the output and reducing the time spent.
If you are a project manager and need to communicate with many different stakeholders, both inside and outside your company, AI can help you gather all the needed data and make tailored communications that improve how people receive and act on what you’re trying to say.
If you are programming, AI can review your software for security vulnerabilities.
If you're doing market research, AI can help you conduct better competitive analysis or explore what-if scenarios by searching the web and synthesizing content.
If you working on a bid, AI can help you find unmet requirements in your proposal compared to the RFP you received, or show where your writing is unclear.
The pattern across these examples is that AI is most valuable as a quality multiplier, not just a shortcut. It helps you catch what you would have missed, tailor what you would have generalized, and raise the standard of what “good” looks like.
My takeaway? Treat AI like we eventually treated the web. The winners won’t be the people who publish the most, fastest. They’ll be the people who use new tools to make clearer decisions, communicate better, and consistently ship work that’s worth reading.
The bar for “good work” is about to climb again. Where do you see your bar shifting?
Image from https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/apple-1996