I wrote a piece a while back having a go at advisers who use AI to write their client articles. My line was that clients want to hear from you, in your own words, however awkward. Warts and all.
I still think that. But I owe you an honest update, because we use AI now too, and I’d rather you heard how from me than guessed.
Here’s the actual arrangement. When we write something for you, a blog like this one, a note about markets, an explanation of something fiddly, we often start with an AI tool. We tell it what we think, point it at how we write, and it gives us back a first attempt. Usually a wordy, slightly bland first attempt that sounds like nobody in particular.
Then one of us takes it apart. We cut the bits that sound like a machine trying to be impressive. We put back the awkward, human phrasing it smooths away. We argue with it. By the time it reaches you, it’s been through a real person who’s changed most of it and stands behind all of it.
So the tool does the donkey work of the blank page. The thinking, the judgement, the voice, the bit where someone decides what’s actually true and worth saying to you, that stays with us. That was always the part that mattered.
Taleb has a line I keep coming back to. Give a pilot an altimeter that’s sometimes wrong and he’ll crash the plane. Give him nothing and he’ll look out the window. The danger isn’t the instrument. It’s trusting it when you’ve stopped looking out of the window yourself.
We use the instrument. We haven’t stopped looking out of the window. And nothing about your money, the decisions, the advice, the conversation in the room, comes from a machine. That’s a person, every time.
If that ever stops being true, I’ll tell you that too.