As artificial intelligence continues down its path towards dominating our daily lives, it has me wondering about the future of wordsmithing. I mean, “Artificial Intelligence”? That’s the best the technologists and their machines could come up with? Seems to me a little wordsmithing is in order. “Galactical Intelligence”; “Towering Intellect”; “Noble Astuteness”; these are just a few, wordsmithed versions for A.I. that come to mind. What are your ideas? Are you a wordsmith?
According to definitions from Oxford Languages, the world’s leading dictionary publisher:
Wordsmith: a skilled user of words
One of the first applications of AI has been writing - emails; reports; etc. I’m told, machines are studying mankind in order to gain their writing intelligence. That makes me nervous, too based on this from our favorite, Unknown Sage:
Rules for Good Riting
· Just between you and i, case is important.
· Verbs has to agree with their subject.
· Watch out for irregular verbs which has cropped up into our language.
· Don't use no double negatives.
· When dangling, don't use participles.
· Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
· And don't use conjunctions to start sentences.
· Don't use a run-on sentence you got to punctuate it.
· In letters themes reports articles and stuff like that we use commas to keep strings apart.
· Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
· Its important to use apostrophe's right.
· Don't abbrev.
· Check to see if you any words out.
· In my opinion I think that the author when he is writing should not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words which he does not really need.
· Then, of course, there's that old one: Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.
· Last but not least, avoid clichĂ©s like the plague.
Now you might be thinking, “Gary, it’s just words.” Well OK but, let’s remember the impact our choice of words can have. Like this tale of two monks that I’ve shared before:
Two monks were meeting in the hall. "Good day, Brother John. You look a bit down in the mouth." "Yes, Brother Mark. I just asked the Bishop if it was alright to smoke while I prayed, and he said, ‘Absolutely not!" "That is interesting, Brother John, because just yesterday I asked the Bishop if it was alright to pray while I smoked, and he said, ‘Sure."
Harlan Goehger
So before I take up smoking again, I simply hope Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Generative A.I. get their collective intelligences together and give mankind a better outcome; like what we got with… say… artificial sweeteners (wordsmithed to “Splenda”); artificial food coloring Yellow 6 (wordsmithed to “Sunset Yellow”); or maybe artificial bacon. (It’s bacon – not everything needs wordsmithing, true?)
GAP
When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.
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