Category Archives: conferences

Am I The AI Luddite?

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Some thoughts on the rush to AI adoption.

I had a really good week at the Lavacon conference last month. As usual, it delivered some exceptional sessions alongside fun and engaging conversations.

Some of the sessions have been informative, some educational, and many thought-provoking. And it is probably no surprise that discussions and mention of AI was an almost constant presence, having grown from a topic of interest last year to having its own dedicated track this year.

Yet in all honesty, I remain somewhat conflicted in my feelings about both the technology and the speed of its seemingly global adoption.

In fact part way through the first day I texted the following to my wife, Gill:

God I’m feeling like the Luddite old codger. It seems that everyone is drinking from the AI hype hose. Maybe I’m too much a writer than a techy these days.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-AI in general terms. I’ve been honored to work on projects and products that use AI for things where I believe that AI can really help – by taking on repetitive tasks to do things at a speed, scale, and level of accuracy that humans can’t match. AI is brilliant at pattern matching, building connections between data types, data mining and even providing predictive analytics.

What I do have issues with is the apparent blind adoption of Generative AI. Maybe it’s because I am a writer at heart, that I don’t understand the apparent rush to divest ourselves of the skill that made us human in the first place – the ability to share our personal knowledge and ideas.

As my colleague Joe Gollner pointed out on one of the slides in his Lavacon presentation, “The Unlikely (but necessary) marriage of Content & Engineering,” there is danger in a situation ‘When AI Runs Amok’ which he defined as:

AI consuming information indiscriminately, without management guidance on objectives and guardrails, and without scalable oversight.

Organizations savor the chance to offload responsibility while harvesting superficial benefits.

Sound familiar?

As Joe pointed out:

This form of AI is as popular as it is dangerous.

Yet despite this, pretty much every other presentation I attend included phrases like “just feed content to the AI, or “make your content AI-ready,” or “use AI to generate content…” with none of them addressing what to me are the underlying issues of:

Legal and Moral – Where is the content that is feeding the Large Language Model (LLM) powering your AI coming from? Does your company own it, or have rights to use it? 

If you are using a public OpenAI tool, like ChatGPT, the chances are that the content driving your output is based on stolen copyrighted content just scraped from an online source without the original owner’s permission (I have found a couple of my own short stories where this has happened – so I may have a personal bias).

Then there is the fact that most platforms these days switch on AI scraping tools as default and you have to jump through multiple hoops to disable the feature to opt out – Looking at you LinkedIn, WordPress, Meta, and others. – If you are OK with your content being used to train someone else’s AI then it should be an Opt-In process.

Environmental –  There seems to be a perception that AI is some sort of magic that just happens, The infrastructure behind it is complex, and growing at an exponential rate.

The power needs and environmental impact of the huge data centers needed to power AI is currently catastrophic. I’ve heard it said that the power distribution systems are about 5 years behind the AI data centers’ current needs. We could be facing power outages caused just by AI demand. There was an article recently that reported that Microsoft was looking at an operating lease to recommission the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant just to power its AI data centers!

Then there is the water consumption needed to cool these massive data centers.  The average data center uses 300,000 gallons of water per day, which is about the same as 100,000 homes. Each time an AI tool is prompted, it uses about 16 ounces of water  – about the amount of a regular bottle of drinking water – each time you make a prompt it’s like pouring a bottle of water on the floor.

The environmental impact of a single AI prompt

Business needs – Putting aside the dubious business practices of many of the new AI-based tech companies for the moment. If your company is using AI we should be asking what business problem they are trying to solve? I have yet to have anyone give me an answer for using Generative AI that made me go “oh yeah now I get it.” – In many cases what I get is something along the lines that a senior executive has told various functional groups that they need to find a place where AI can be used in the business. This is putting the cart before the horse. In my opinion, Generative AI is currently an immature technology in search of a solution.

Of course, there’s also the whole quality of the output issue – which is a topic for another long future discussion.

If you are going to implement Generative AI, then you need to be asking yourself questions:

  • What is the problem you will solve by using it?
  • Do you know where the content is coming from?
  • Do you have the rights to it?
  • Are you OK with the environmental impact of your AI usage?
  • Are you just doing it so the CEO can say you are an AI company on the next earnings call?

In his presentation, Joe outlined how to sensibly align Content Strategy, Content Operations, and Content Engineering to form a stable ecosystem where Content and AI can work together. Now that I could get behind. (provided we can address the business, governance, and environmental issues – all big asks) – But unfortunately, we’ve got a long way to go to get there.

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This article was first published in THE CONTENT POOL newsletter on 31 October 2024 / Header art by Tom Humberstone [first published in the MIT Technology Review].

We’ll See You At The Conference…

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Our 2024 industry conference season will be kicking off in a few weeks, and you’ll be able to catch up with us in May at the following events:

CEX – Content Entrepreneurs Expo – May 5-7 – Cleveland, OH.

This will be our first time at the CEX event and we are looking forward to mixing with the new generation of content entrepreneurs to learn about building profitable content-based businesses.

STC Summit  – May 17-19 – Bloomington, MN

The annual conference for the Society of Technical Communicators has been a regular highlight of our year for many years now, and I’m delighted to once again be participating as both a speaker and industry panelist.

Adobe DITAWorld 2023

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Welcome to Intelligent Content for an Intelligent World – so ran the tag line for this year’s Adobe DITAWorld which bills itself as the world’s biggest DITA Online Conference for Marketing and Technical Communication Professionals.

I’ll be honest I’m not a big fan of online conferences as I tend to find my focus drifting away by the distractions of being in my home office. I much prefer being at in-person events. When I’m in a session listening to a speaker I can remain focused on them and what they are saying. Outside of the sessions I can network with other attendees or vendors, or just enjoy a little people watching.

So when I do sign up for a virtual event the pressure is on for the organizers and speakers to put together a program that will keep my attention over a span of several days. Not an easy task, but I’m glad to say that this year’s DITAWorld did just that.

It was an engaging three days with topics running from the current rise of generative AI, to deep dives in to DITA coding and verification, by way of practical use cases in structured content, knowledge management, and translation. And the sidebar chat and Q&A channels were equally engaging. – It was almost like being at an in-person event.

Here’s a quick rundown of the sessions that I enjoyed and found educational and thought provoking.

Day 1

  • Is AI the meteor? Are we the dinosaurs?  An early assessment of AI in Content Operations – Sarah O’Keefe, CEO at Scriptorium, USA
  • All Knowledge in Balance: EY’s Knowledge Evolution – How EY uses DITA to Drive the Evolution of Global Assurance Knowledge – Brian R. Scordinsky, Technology Director at Ernst & Young, USA – Shannon Waida, Associate Director at Ernst & Young, USA
  • The Best of Both Worlds – Why Mayo Clinic chose Adobe Experience Manager Guides – Sebastian Fuhrer, Director of Content Engineering & Operations at Mayo Clinic, USA – Bernard Aschwanden, EVP, Business Development at Precision Content, Canada
  • Content Symphony – Orchestrating Excellence – Elevating Enterprise Communication in the AI Age – Chad Dybdahl, Senior Solution Consultant at Acrolinx
  • From Structure to Process – Why Structured Content is more than you think! – Markus Wiedenmaier, CEO at c-rex.net, Germany

Day 2

  • Structured Content Horizons: Mapping the Future – Harnessing DITA, Adobe Experience Manager Guides, and AI for future experiences – Rob Hanna, President & Co-Founder at Precision Content, Canada
  • Using the Power of DITA – Creating content for multichannel delivery – Hanna Heinonen, Digital Content Lead at KONE, Finland – Kristian Forsman, Solution Owner Content Management at KONE, Finland
  • Don’t Reinvent the Wheel  – Implementing Structured Authoring – Amanda Patterson, Technical Communications Manager at Hunter Douglas, USA
  • Intelligent Content for the Manufacturing Industry – How to digitalize content in a traditional industry – Ulrike Parson, CEO at parson AG, Germany

Day 3

  • Pioneering Journeys: Tracing Content Evolution – Customer Engagement Transformation –Julian Murfitt, CEO of Mekon, UK
  • Engineering Global Connections – Multilingual Mastery – Ronald Egle, Content Systems Administrator at Ariel Corporation, USA
  • Stick to Your DITA Standards – Using Schematron to add custom DITA validation  – Marco Cacciacarro,, Enterprise Documentation Manager at BlackBerry, USA

Recordings of the session are available on YouTube in the Adobe DITAWORLD 2023 Playlist.

And I must give a shout out to Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe Matt Sullivan, CEO at Tech Comm Tools for organizing the event and being excellent co-hosts across the three days.

An Inspiring Ice-T, the rise of AI, and other CMSWire CONNECT observations.

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“Ice-T? Why would they have Ice-T at a conference dedicated to customer experience?” Well by the conclusion of my two days at the CMSWire CONNECT conference in Austin last week I had my answer.

But more on Ice-T later.

First off a nod of thanks to my CMSWire editors Dom Nicastro and Siobhan Fagan for arranging for me to attend the conference as a CMSWire contributor. It was great to spend time in person with people I’ve been writing for over the last six years. It was also an excellent opportunity to meet other members of the CMSWire team too. 

Early encounter with AI personas

My two days started off with attending a very thought-provoking Breakfast Briefing from Erin Reilly of the University of Texas on The Rise of Virtual Beings and how they are transforming the customer experience. I must admit I hadn’t given much thought to the use of three-dimensional avatars beyond gaming applications, but her examples of AI-driven personas certainly gave me pause to think about how the digital landscape is continuing to evolve.

Metrics of CX – data and experience

In his discussion on The Customer of the Future, the University of Texas’s Art Markman discussed the application of cognitive psychology to customer behavior and how we measure it. One point that really caught my attention was the observation that

 “If we spend time just looking at data we start to think that every interaction is a digital experience. We need to look beyond that and embrace the real-life experiences and engagements.”

This really resonated as I’ve had several conversations recently about the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative metrics when it comes to determining the quality of content-driven interactions. This drove home that both are equally important. As one later speaker put it, and I’m afraid I missed taking a note of who it was, it’s no good knowing the ‘What’ if we don’t know the ‘Why.’

Katrina Taylor of LuLu Lemon also summed it up nicely in her excellent presentation on Human-Centered Design for Omni-Channel Delivery when she stated:

“You can go through all the data in the world, but you will learn way more in a 30-minute conversation with those on the front line who interface with customers.”

Intelligent content drives personalization

I must admit my heart gave a little jump to hear Matthew Shaeffer from REI talk about the need for intelligent content in his talk on Modernizing the CX Stack. His observation that Intelligent CX  needs to be a series of uniquely assembled interactions driven by content that is structurally rich, and semantically categorized was great to hear. Engineering content in such a way is key to delivering the granular levels of personalized interactions most companies are looking to achieve, and it was great to hear of a major retailer adopting this approach.

Tarunam Verma from Lowes made a smart observation during his presentation on Hyper-Personalization that what we think of as personalization isn’t just about applying technology, in reality, it’s a mix of culture, mindset, and the technology.

Is AI really Augmented Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence?

The second day of the conference had a strong theme around the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with some excellent observations and talking points discussed throughout the day. Here’s a snapshot of some of the ones that caught my attention:

  • “Use AI in support of creativity not instead of creativity” – Karna Crawford (ex-Ford)
  • “AI is most useful currently as a back-office application that detects operational inefficiencies.”  / “There are two waves of AI: (1) recommendation engines – which are established, and (2) generative – which we are still trying to figure out.” / “Don’t implement AI just for the sake of it, know what problem you are trying to solve. / AI requires us to rethink how we do things.” – Daniel Wu (J.P. Morgan)
  • “Think of AI as ‘Augmented Intelligence” that helps us do our tasks better, not ‘Artificial Intelligence’ that will replace us.” – Raj Krishan (Microsoft).

One of the best questions of the day came from CMSWire facilitator Kate Cox who posed her panelists a pretty philosophical question:

“If I use AI to craft an email and you use AI to read it, are we actually communicating?”

Ice-T on Walls and Boats

Which brings us back to Ice-T as the conference closing keynote. I wasna sure what a former gangster, turned rapper, turned actor would have to say that would be relevant to an audience full of technologists. In fact, I was in two minds about staying, thinking I’d leave a bit early to get ahead of the Austin downtown Friday traffic exodus; but I’m glad I did as he delivered one of the best conference keynotes I’ve seen.

It was entertaining, full of amazing stories, and above all an inspirational discussion on handling change. Here are just a few of his observations that I jotted down:

  • “There are walls – things that you can’t change – and obstacles that look like walls. Get over the obstacles by talking to people that have already got over them. But then make sure to put in the work that they put in.”
  • “Don’t ever get annoyed at the lack of results from the work you didn’t do.”
  • “Anything you do you bring your perspective to it. That’s your value. Make it your own thing.”
  • “Don’t complain, just figure stuff out.”
  • “Take opportunity when it turns up. A lot of times the opportunity is right in front of you. Just get in that boat, at least for long enough to say ‘I don’t like it.’ If you don’t you’ll never know.”

And if the CONNECT conference was one thing, it was a great opportunity to learn from, meet, and network with a whole raft of new people. Thanks to all I chatted with be it after presentations, at vendor booths, or over coffee or meal breaks.

Here’s to getting in the boat.

A Timely Reminder – Intelligent Content Conference

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This timely reminder arrived in my email this morning.

ICCflyer header

Intelligent Content is one of my favorite conferences and I always enjoy speaking there. This year I’ll be talking about Building a Business Driven Globalization Strategy For Content.

So if you haven’t registered yet, I recommend that you hop over to the Intelligent Content Conference website and do so immediately.

See you in San Jose.

10 Commandments of Storytelling Applied to Technical Content.

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I originally wrote this blog post back in 2009, but as it’s come up a few times in various conference conversations during the past few weeks – I thought it might be worth an update and repost.

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I’m a strong advocate of storytelling in all forms of communications. I believe that it applies as much to technical or marketing communication as it does to your favorite novel or movie. So I decided to see if I could apply screenwriting guru, Robert McKee’s 10 Commandments of Storytelling to Technical Documentation.

1. Thou shalt not take the crisis or climax out of the protagonists hands. So who is the “protagonist” of your documentation? It could be your product, but the most likely candidate is that your “protagonist” is the person using your documentation. Your documentation should be written in such a way that your protagonist can use the information so that they feel that they have solved the crisis (or put more prosaically, overcome the problem they have) themselves based on the knowledge you have presented. Another story telling trick, often cited by screen-writer Todd Alcot, that is worth remembering – ask yourself “What does the protagonist want?”

2. Thou shalt not make life easy for the protagonist. This seems contrary to the very purpose of Technical Documentation. Isn’t it our job to make life easier? Yes it is. But in certain types of documentation, such as training materials, you may want to include challenges, and then guide the reader through them. This way you can build a sense of accomplishment as the reader progresses through the material.

3. Thou shalt not use false mystery or surprise. Don’t hold back anything that is integral to full understanding of the product or service you are writing about. But also make sure to reveal information in a logical manner that is considerate of the reader’s needs. Make sure they have the information they need to know, at the time they need it.

4. Thou shalt respect thine audience. The first rule of any sort of writing is “know your audience.” Know them, and respect their level of knowledge. If you are writing something for experts, then you may not need to include the basic information that you might use for a more general consumer market. The use of conditional text is a great way to handle different topics and statements designed for different audiences within a common documentation set.

5. Thou shalt have a god-like knowledge of your universe. A joke I often use is “What’s the definition of an ‘expert’?” – The answer is “it’s a person who has read two more pages in the manual than you have.” So what does that make the person who wrote the manual in the first place? We may not know everything about what we are documenting, but we should give the reader the confidence that we do.

6. Thou shall use complexity rather than complication. Most of what we write about in Tech Doc, is by its very nature, complex. We should take that complexity and break it down into logical steps and topics that can guide the reader. We should never use complexity as an excuse for making the documentation complicated.

7. Thou shalt take your character to the end of the line. We learn in grade school that every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The same applies to documentation too. The narrative should guide the reader through the process, or information, in such a way that it flows logically, and that at the end they know more, or have achieved more, than when they started.

8. Thou shalt not write on the nose dialog. Wait, I hear you asking, there’s no dialog in Tech Doc – so how does this apply? Well the definition of “on the nose dialog” relates to the scene when a character says aloud, exactly what he is thinking or describes what is happening around him. So how does this apply to Tech Doc? Do you have sections of doc that are restating the obvious? Try reading your docs out aloud? Is it boring and repetitious? Try altering sentence lengths. Don’t think anyone ever listens to docs as if it was dialog? As a teenager I spent hours working under cars while a buddy nearby would read the steps from the manual for me to follow. How about a visually impaired customer using a reading device?

9. Thou shalt dramatize thine exposition. Put simply “show don’t tell.” In prose this means have your characters reacting to an event, not talking about it. But isn’t our job to tell people how to do something? Yes it is, but the key word is “how.” Replace long descriptive texts on operational theory with a few active steps the user can take themselves, that demonstrates the product, and they will gain a quicker understanding. People learn more by doing than they do by being told.

10. Thou shalt rewrite. Do I need to explain this one? Plan your schedule with time to write, have someone else review, and rewrite. Best of all scenarios is to write, have someone actually use your draft to accomplish the tasks you have written about, get feedback. Better yet, watch them try to use your docs. Then go back and rewrite based on your observations. They say that any good piece of art is never finished. Writing is art, even Tech Writing. You can always improve on what you’ve done.

Know Your Muppets.

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I may have been the only one in the room who noticed, or even cared, but it annoyed me.

During a recent presentation by a top industry analyst they referenced an on-line marketing campaign that had featured The Muppets. On one PowerPoint slide there was a picture of Kermit The Frog.

The analyst proudly said something along the lines of “As you can see this campaign was aimed at children because it uses the characters from Sesame Street.”

My geek-alert radar triggered at the mistake. Kermit is of course not a Sesame Street character, but  the leader of The Muppets. It was an innocent enough mistake, even an understandable one. But it was compounded by the fact that I knew a little about the campaign being referenced, which was in fact not aimed at children, but their parents.

The consultant immediately dropped a couple of notches on my internal credibility monitor.

In fact during the day the same consultant made a few pop-culture references, and I could tell that they didn’t really understand the context of what they were saying.

This got me thinking about my own presentations. I’m a self confessed geek, I even have a T-shirt declaring the fact, so I have a tendency to pepper my conversations with pop-culture references. The same applies to a lot of presentations I do, more so in public conferences than during internal meetings. But, I always make sure those references are related to things I know about; I’d never make an on-line gaming or baseball reference as I have no interest, or reference, for either.

If you do make some sort of external reference when presenting to an audience, then make sure it’s factually correct and applies in context, because if you don’t there is bound to be someone in the audience who will spot your error. And that error will undermine everything else you say.

The same applies to the content you produce and deliver to your audience online. The best content is that which engages the audience and provides value. To deliver that sort of value we often produce content that puts our products or services in the context of the customer’s story and experience. We talk about, and reference, their industry, their process, their culture. If we get any part of that wrong, the customer will notice and it will undermine everything else we claim about our products.

Before you put out any sort of content that makes external references make sure you know your Muppets!

A Tale of Two Cities (and Conferences)

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It is the best of times, it is the worst of times*. Or at least that’s the impression about the state of the content development industry that came across during two different publishing conferences I have attended in the last few weeks. Hosted in two cities that couldn’t have been more diverse, Palm Springs, CA and Austin, TX, the conferences were opposite reflections of their locations.

Palm Springs CA can perhaps be summed up by the fact that the city’s greatest attraction appears to be an aging vaudeville theater that boasts that it is home to the World’s oldest chorus line! This, the city not the theater chorus line, was the venue for the 2012 Intelligent Content Conference (ICC12), a vibrant well programmed exchange of ideas that drew attendees from various aspects of the enterprise content development world, especially from service information, business process, and marketing; along with new technology practitioners, leading consultants, and content strategists. This group understood that the real value of the new publishing model was in the content itself (hence the title of the conference.)

The underlying feeling coming away from this conference was that the attendees thought that this was indeed the “best of times” to be in content development. The biggest revolution in content development and delivery since the invention of the printing press is opening up an incalculable number of opportunities to redefine both the business model, and the way we tell our stories and interact with those who consume them.

Austin, TX on the opening day of the annual SXSW Interactive conference gives off that same vibe of excitement and opportunity as leading thinkers, futurists, innovators, and entrepreneurs descend on the Texas capital to discuss the future of the web. Part of this year’s opening day events included a one-day mini-conference based on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change (TOC) annual publishing industry get together in New York. As expected the majority of attendees where from the worlds of traditional book and magazine publishing. The contrast between this crowd and the attendees at Intelligent Content, and the larger SXSW crowd, couldn’t have been more marked. The underlying vibe that I picked up at the TOC day was one of confusion, and even panic.

The first speaker, mobile designer Josh Clark, provided one of the best summaries on how to approach the new publishing paradigm when he said that “Your product is called content, everything else is a container.” He also went on to say that “Mobile isn’t about Apps. An App isn’t a strategy.” Yet nearly every other speaker, and question from the audience, ignored this great advice. The focus of most conversations was firmly on the delivery process and medium, not about the thing actually being delivered, the content. And during the sessions I was at I never heard a single word about how to add value to the content by making it intelligent

My feeling was that most of the TOC audience this is “the worst of times,” as things are changing too fast to understand, and the traditional business model no longer works.

And that’s where I believe the disconnect between these two groups originates – with the business model.

In the corporate world the development of content is a key part of any business process (In fact in THE CONTENT POOL book I put forward that it is THE key component), and that while it may not always be recognized as such, it is generally developed irrespective of the delivery platform. Yes particular platforms may be specified, but they are more a matter of convenience and familiarity than an integral part of the company’s overall business model. The value to the organization is implicitly in the content, not the delivery model.

In traditional publishing, no matter what lip service is paid to content, it is the delivery mechanism that provides the value. The business model of traditional publishing is built around the infrastructure and process to move pieces of paper from the printer, to the warehouse, to the retail outlet, and eventually into your hands as a consumer. It is only you, as a consumer, who then derives any value from what was on that paper – the content.

While the corporate world sees new delivery models as an opportunity to provide more and more intelligent content, traditional publishing sees it as a disruptive event to a centuries old infrastructure.

The best of times; the worst of times.

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* With apologies to Charles Dickens for the paraphrasing. – “A Tale of Two Cities” was originally published concurrently in two separate formats – In the weekly magazine All Year Round without illustrations , and in collected monthly installments with illustrations by regular Dickens artist Halbot Browne (from which the illustration at the top of this post is taken.) Dickens was a master of realizing the value of his content over format often publishing new works in various formats and platforms to reach the widest possible audience, before eventually publishing the full work as a novel.

If he were around today, I’m sure he would be one of the pioneers of digital publishing.

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THE CONTENT POOL book – Just a week away.

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I’m looking forward to the Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs next week for several reasons.

And top of that list is the fact that the conference will be the location for the official launch for my latest book, THE CONTENT POOL, which in many ways is based on this blog. (Cover above.)

Today Scott Abel posted an interview with me abut the book, and the ICC12 launch, at his Content Wrangler site.

I mention in the interview that we will be publishing a special limited edition of THE CONTENT POOL for conference attendees. The ICC12 Edition will be limited to just 100 copies and will include an exclusive chapter linked to the panel on “Making a Business Case for Innovation” which I will be participating in at the conference.

If you are heading to Palm Springs next week for ICC12 I look forward to seeing you.

If you can’t make the conference the standard edition of THE CONTENT POOL is available for pre-order.