The Uninvited Author: AI, intent, and the future of content
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In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Carlos Evia discuss their upcoming book: The Uninvited Author: AI, Intent, and the Future of Content.
Carlos Evia: One of the things that we really want to invite people who end up reading this book to do is engage critically with AI tools across the text cycle. It’s not magic. It’s a collection of ugly computers in water-chugging data centers that work primarily on predictability approaches. And I truly think that we need to be critical in our engagement with AI as authors and as readers of content.
Related links:
- Digital sovereignty in the age of AI
- From ad hoc to autonomous: The AI content ops maturity model
- Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on Sarah O’Keefe and Carlos Evia’s book: The Uninvited Author
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Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everyone, this is Sarah O’Keefe. I’m here with Carlos Evia. Hi, Carlos.
Carlos Evia: Hello!
SO: So, Carlos, for those of you who don’t know, is the co-author of this book that we’re working on and also professor at Virginia Tech. His official title, his official titles are Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives at Virginia Tech, and he is also the CTO of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. I think, Carlos, that means you’re the computer guy in the humanities world.
CE: That means that people come and complain to me about curriculum and also about their computers. So yes.
SO: Okay, cool. And so with that, Carlos and I have written this book. And in this first episode to this special series, we wanted to give you an overview of what it is that we’ve done, or what it is we hope we’ve done, we are trying to achieve here. And probably the easiest way to do that is actually to break down the official book titles. So what is our official book title?
CE: The Uninvited Author: AI, Intent, and the Future of Content. And I don’t know if I got it right from memory.
SO: No, I think that’s right, only because I wrote it down. So I’ve been staring at it nonstop for, you know, four to six months now, but still.
CE: Yeah. yeah. I see it now. Ha ha ha.
SO: You know, can we remember our own book title at this point in the writing process? And we should tell you that we’re recording this as we’re approaching sort of ninety percent done, which means that we still have approximately ninety percent of the work to do. And we’re a little punchy.
CE: My co-author today woke up being very optimistic about progress on the books. But I agree, 90% sounds accurate. Yes, I’m not gonna argue.
SO: Yes, you’re well, your co-author is slightly delusional, so we’ll just set that aside and move on. All right, so let’s talk about this. The main title is the uninvited author. So who is the uninvited author? What are we talking about here?
CE: Well, the uninvited author, surprise, is the AI author. We have seen how AI has been taking over the generation of content at different types of content, content for marketing purposes, content for technical purposes, content in video, in text, in audio. And in some of those cases, it’s creeping into people’s workflow without an invitation. And now, and we know people, I mean, across the different facets of content work that now are, on purpose, inviting AI agents to contribute or to take over and start driving the car of the content operations. But particularly for the type of content that we do in our little corner of technical communication, AI, authors kind of started coming as uninvited guests that will appear when a user will use a chatbot, say going to ChatGPT or going to Claude asking how do I do this instead of going to the published official manual of the name of the appliance or name, the software application.
And what we realized is that what was happening is that as the company, I write my documentation, I put it on the website, I put it on a book if I’m in 1985, and I give that to my users. And I hope that that’s what they use. I am the author. I bring it to you. But now when a user prompts a chat button and says, how do I turn on this machine? How do I save a file in this software application?
Now there’s a new author that is going to give information that might be accurate, that might reflect what I wrote, or might be inaccurate. It might be, like you said, delulu and inventing some other content. So that is the uninvited author. An author that is already here and is adding to what other humans have created or written or flat-out making up stuff out of nowhere that didn’t exist and that was not created by humans before.
SO: And I think that this this theme of loss of control for the humans returns in maybe every page of this every page of this book. So we have the AI that is now delivering… well, it was delivering content, right? And when you had a search engine, you would ask it a question and it would return answers, but in general, those answers were, “Here’s what I found in this document,” or “Here’s a collection of links,” or whatever. The what’s new is that the AI is synthesizing answers from its sources, and we don’t know what those sources are necessarily. Sometimes they’re cited, sometimes they’re not.
I asked the chatbot something the other day, and it said it was something very straightforward like how old is somebody, like famous person. And it gave me an answer, and I said, cite your sources. And it said, this is just general knowledge. I’m sorry. How is this general knowledge? It it would not and then it said, but you know, it got kind of passive-aggressive. It was like, well, if you insist, I can give you a couple of websites that list this kind of information. but essentially it was like, how dare you question my knowledge of just the general universe? Well, I I use computers for a living, so I question everything.
All right, so the uninvited author is the AI, and now the chatbot is authoring content, accurately or not, whether we like it or not. So our subtitle then is AI Intent and the Future of Content. When we look at AI in the context of content, what are we looking at here? How does AI get involved in content operations, in the content process?
CE: Well, we have been chatting, ha ha, we have been chatting about chatbots so far, but the chatbot, it’s really only scratching the surface of what AI already is for content operations. I don’t even want to think about right now, let’s save it for the next section of the title of what it’s going to do or what it could do.
CE: And the chatbot is the easiest representation of it. And yesterday I was teaching, I’m teaching this semester a senior seminar in communication on the topic of what AI is doing to the profession of communication, for good or for bad. And something that my students tell me is that they use ChatGPT or a similar chatbot as a replacement for the Google search box. So they go there and they go ahead and ask and prompt without prompting, ask, they query things that up to two or three years ago, people would just ask Uncle Google.
SO: Now, in their defense, it’s getting very difficult to actually find the search box.
CE: If you go to Google, yeah, you don’t know what’s Google, and you don’t know what’s Gemini. They’re all married and combined together. And I think that that is the very interesting part. But the chatbot in that box that resembles the Google Omni box is only one component of what we mean by AI. AI comes in many other flavors that I think my co-author in this book even has a fancy table inserted on page number here about the different forms of AI engagement in content operations. And at the end of that spectrum, we have agentic approaches to AI in which you, as the developer or you as the author of the content, are going to be sending out these AI agents to be taking care of processes or supporting processes that human beings are doing throughout the life cycle of your content.
So I want to emphasize that what we’re talking about here is not just ChatGPT, not just Gemini or even Claude, but many in-house developed and maintained in a little or not so little computer in one organization implementation of not just a large language model, but many other machine learning and data mining approaches that could create something that smells or looks like artificial intelligence beyond basic automation. So AI means many things, and we have more than one section in the book that tries to address that AI is many things, even though for the majority of people who probably are listening to this AI is ChatGPT in that box.
SO: And one of I think one of the really tricky parts about this is that, as content people, we see AI in lots of different places in our in our job roles. So what I mean by that is that mean, we’ll start at the end. The content consumer, it used to be get your content on the website, do some search engine optimization, keywords, whatever, make sure that people find your content. Or you might be privileged that your content is ships with the product as online help or a companion document. Again, if it’s nineteen eighty five, but you know, it’s the supporting content that goes with the content, or you’re working on knowledge bases, that type of thing. So as a content creator, I’m thinking about what does it mean
SO: To get my content in front of the end customer. And if that is now mediated by a chatbot, how do I make sure that it survives the trip through the chatbot so that the content, the instructions, the information still reaches that end user instead of them getting, you know, something potentially inaccurate? So that’s the front end, right? There’s also the issue that LLMs and chatbots have the ability to create what we call synthetic content. Content that doesn’t previously exist, but when I ask the chatbot for it, it gets generated. There are lots of examples of this, but machine translation is one. Hey, can you give this to me in a different language, please? And it says okay, and it magically machine translates it and gives you what you’re asking for. Make it shorter, make it longer, give me more information, give me less information. Write it in a different style. Those are all cases where the chatbot is intervening and putting its own layer on top of that. And then as you work your way backwards, there’s authoring assistance, you know, fix my grammar, refactor my sentences, that kind of thing. And as a content creator, the availability of AI across the entire what you know, the text cycle.
The process of creating and editing and managing and delivering content, it affects every single one of those pieces. And we have to really think carefully about how and where and whether or not to integrate that into content operations. What are appropriate and inappropriate ways of doing that?
CE: I think you said something very interesting when you refer to a magical process. The assumption is that a magical process happens and then voila, you have something that the AI agent or the AI chatbot generated or assisted in the generation. If we go back to that separation of the backend or the front end. And that’s where I think that one of the things that we really want to invite people who end up reading this book is to engage critically with AI tools across the text cycle. And we haven’t even talked about the concept of the text cycle, which is a major component of the book, because it might be that you, as an author or you as a content reader, as a consumer of content, prompt a chatbot for information on how to do this, either to write something or to read something and solve a problem. But it’s not magic. It’s a collection of ugly computers in water-chugging data centers that work primarily on predictability approaches. And I truly think that we need to be critical in our engagement with AI as authors and as readers of content and not just about technical content. If you’re doomscrolling on Instagram, and let’s not even mention TikTok because I don’t use TikTok, I’m very old. And you see these AI sloppy videos from dozens of people fighting in like every Mortal Combat. Let’s ask why…
SO: You seem to know a lot about this for someone that doesn’t use TikTok.
CE: I doomscroll a lot. You’re like, what is this, and what is happening behind the scenes? How do we think critically about the concept of AI as it becomes an invited or uninvited component in communication processes? And it’s not magic. It does things fast. Sometimes it does it in an accurate way. The models are getting very interesting, and they tend to be way more accurate than they were just a year ago. But I think that’s an invitation that engage with this critically. And I want to peddle this book as an approach for people in our profession, particularly in technical communication, in content operations, to read this and start thinking in terms that allowed him to expand that idea of this is the oracle. I will post a question, and I hope I get something good in return, and my life can be better.
SO: Yeah, I think one of the most useful things you can do with AI is sit down and ask it a question about something that you are an actual expert on. That might be a hobby in your life. It might be that you have an interest in, you know, eighteenth century literature. It could be a lot of things, but pick something and ask the AI a question about something that you truly know a lot about. And pay attention to the results you get, and you know it’ll say, would you like me to give you more information about something? And just kind of follow that trail for for a bit. What I found in doing that is that nearly always the first answer, the high-level answer, the sort of overview is pretty accurate. And the farther I chase it, the worse it gets. As I ask it for more and more detail, the details degenerate. It’s still very confident. But it starts just going completely off the rails. Now, then you try the same thing with a topic you don’t really know anything about and you’re like, well, this looks pretty accurate. So essentially, it will get you to a sort of mediocre level of expertise, but if you need to go deeper than that, you run into all sorts of problems. So intent. We have intent in the title. What is intent, and why do we care?
CE: I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, and to a degree, this is something that I wanted to write even back in the early 2000s, not about AI, but in the context of single sourcing of content and how we were embracing, in the early 2000s, approaches for reusing pieces of content that will appear in different deliverables and will adapt on the fly to the needs of different audiences or different versions of a product or something like that. I started thinking about in the tradition of, I’m gonna say a bad word that Sarah doesn’t like: hermeneutics, which is the study of interpretations.
SO: Boo.
CE: And it’s not Herman Munster. Hermeneutics. As an author, as a human author, I write something, and I imprint in that something my intentions, my intent. I want to say something. If you compare it to the rhetorical tradition, that’s your purpose. You have a purpose when you send something out to the world. You have an intention when you put something out in the world. And at the other end of the spectrum of the communication model, there will be somebody who, up to a few years ago, it was most likely a human being and not a machine, who was going to receive that message that you were sending with your intentions and was going to make an interpretation of said message based on their environment, on their cultural background, on their languages, and extract something that will make sense for them.
So that is what we’re talking about here when we mention intentions or intent, because surprising nobody, if we go back to that communication process that today includes the human author, the human reader, and the possibility of a human, sorry, not human, of an AI author or co-author in an AI reader or assistant to the human reader, well, those AI players bring their own intentions. And you mentioned this when you were talking about where is the information that they have coming from? And there are many layers of the training data, models that go out and perform web searches on the fly, models that are looking at your memory and your previous interactions with them, all of those components create the intentions of these AI authors or readers. So we think that intent or intention is a very complicated topic when it comes to AI in content operations, because it can really take things on a completely different path of what that traditional approach of a human talking or a human writing to another human is conveying. But at the same time, also, intention is a good thing from the author’s perspective, because if I imprint my intention and I set some guardrails on my communication processes, that might be my only hope, my only way to battle the production of AI slop.
That is completely taken over by the intentions of the “AI authors.” And I am still not super comfortable calling the AI authors, even though in the book we call them the AI authors. And that’s what we mean by intentions. It’s going to that very basic fundamental concept of I write something, I publish a video, I publish a picture that I took; I have a purpose, I have an intention. What is my intent in publishing that? And what happens when that message gets to a human receiver and that human receiver makes the interpretation out of it? That cycle is truly affected by AI players at all points in the cycle.
SO: Yeah. And then, you know, the last chunk of this is the future of content, which is, you know, pretty much what we might expect. I think I’m gonna wrap it up here because this is getting too long already. We have a lot to say, and much of it we’ve captured, but we’re trying very, very hard to provide a roadmap to, you know, as Carlos is saying, to engage critically with AI, with the tools that are now available to us as authors, as content creators, as content consumers, and to understand, you know, what does it mean to use AI? What kind of biases does AI introduce? We’ve seen a lot of discussions about, it uses too many em dashes and, you know, now I can’t use em dashes anymore because people see that as a proxy for AI-written content.
But what else is it introducing? What kinds of biases are in the training data? What are the ethics of using data that is largely English-centric, biased towards things that are available online, not just biased towards if it’s not available online, then the AI can’t consume it, right? Which is why they’re buying up books and shredding them and scanning them wholesale, which is a whole other thing.
CE: Mm-hmm.
SO: But the digital footprint of what an AI has ingested is different from reality. It’s the AI’s reality. And then you have to ask the question of how far does that deviate from actual reality? And does it do so in predictable ways that we can potentially remediate? So we’d have a fair amount of discussion about algorithms and bias and what it means to work in an environment like this and, you know, are there ways to remediate it? Are there ways to bring this under control? And then finally talked, you know, a fair amount about what it means to live in a world where your chatbot has access to, you know, truly a stupendous amount of information, which means it’s at your fingertips and you can potentially automate and agentify these workflows. what does that mean? Our last sort of section is currently called the next 30 years. We’ve debated changing it to the next 30 months, or I feel like the next 30 days is the most accurate way to portray it. But we are trying to step back and take that longer view of where is this going and what are the implications of all of what’s going on here? So with that, we are mostly done.
CE: Optimistic.
SO: Our goal, our plan is that this book will be available by the end of October, which is to say for LavaCon. if you want to get more information about it, I would say follow this podcast series or sign up for our newsletter. We’ll be sending out updates that way. And I expect there will be some fun special offers as we launch. We expect this thing to be in the vicinity of probably 300 to 350 pages. And we’ve tried hard to make it an actually fun and entertaining read as opposed to something that you have to slog through. And I hope that you will find information in there that you currently cannot get from your chatbot
CE: And it’s not written by AI, it’s written by us in painful writing sessions and lots of online meetings and what have you.
SO: We have suffered greatly, and I would really like for people to read this stuff, and I don’t know about agree with, but at least engage with and have that conversation. I am actually much more interested in finding out what other people think about all these developments than I am in asking the chatbot. So so I hope it’s useful and I look forward to being done.
CE: Me too.
SO: That’s the most exciting part of all of this. We’re gonna do a couple of these podcasts to talk through some of the pieces and parts that are there. I would like to state for the record that we are not going to generate synthetic podcasts off the book content, although we totally could.
CE: Tempting, tempting.
SO: Not very tempting, but it is possible. Given the shape that my voice is in this week, it’s actually, yeah, the listeners might have appreciated that. But I think that’s it. We’ll see you on the next one. And Carlos, thanks, and I’ll talk to you in our next torture meeting.
CE: Thank you very much.
SO: Okay, bye.
Conclusion with ambient background music
CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.
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