Remember The Human: The Technical Reader Version

AI isn't bad, just like hobby dentistry isn't bad; it's fine if you know what you're doing. Well, perhaps that was a bad example for use in comparison, perhaps even deliberately so, but it got your attention, didn't it?

Most AI platforms won't use off-the-wall comparisons, tongue-in-cheek allusion and comedic metaphors because humor is, at worst dangerous if misunderstood and, at best, a waste of copy space if the reader doesn't appreciate it. And, sadly, more and more, I'm seeing a total absence of it embraced as the best possible quality for technical writing. Yuck!

Product managers are very analytical people who, by nature, make data-driven decisions; it's their default existence and why they're so very good at their jobs. But, this visceral avoidance of simple human conventions like mild playfulness may be killing trust and making your product slower to be picked up, and is a destructive over-correction for confusion that mostly only occurs in maladaptive product daydreams.

Now, that may be what you need; you know your audience, right? I mean, do you? Have you surveyed how happy people are with technical material? I'm just wondering out-loud so you do, too.

I love using AI to bulldoze through rote writing: this includes code as well as text; Gemini is one of the best coding and writing companions I've ever had. But, I use it to help assemble all of the ingredients into what I'm doing, not to make something more than the sum of it all.

And if you're leaving personality out of front-line support and documentation, and out of your video presentations, you're costing yourself conversions, I don't care what your steel-faced PM or designer says.

Well, I do care what they say, and you should too, but this can be a touchy topic and kick off a passionate discussion.

Writing Guidelines Are Absolutely Essential, But Often Stifle Instead

Content and other outward-communicating teams must have some shared sense of the company persona, voice and style. Wording should be at a sixth-grade or seventh-grade reading level and content must typically be presented in an active voice. Those are great guidelines that will help people come up with compelling narratives, but it presents a framework for how they should present themselves presenting the content, not just bland, faceless presentation.

Being the voice of a company means being a person empowered to speak for the company, not just a proxy for a voice that's not your own. If you can't visibly invest yourself emotionally into what you create, you shouldn't expect others to, either.

I'm not promoting cracking jokes at every turn or adding paragraphs of reading for useless anecdotes; I'm saying stop looking at brevity as a feature and more as a symptom if you get low engagement from technical content, whether humans or generative AI writes it.

Documentation, Support & FAQ Resources Pre-determine Future Experiences

If I have a problem with your (whatever it is: fooswizzle), I want to know that the person helping me has the agency required to help. I want to know that the people on the phone won't just read a script. I want to depend on vendors with cultures where people speak up about bad ideas, so they don't happen.

Having no trace of personality, no trace of yearning to back-up or exceed claims made in product literature, no trace of shared frustration with the existing product landscape: this sterility isn't good communication, it's a disingenuous veil of machine-like dispassionate demeanor when humans do it to their writing. Generated content is like a yolk, it needs more to come to life in everything from documentation to help desk responses.

Many of us still use emotional connections, even tiny ones, as points in the "for" column when making discretionary spending choices. Even if we should technically be acting more like data-driven robots.

Total Machine Generation Is Usually A Bad Idea

Gemini could, with careful prompts, generate somewhat witty technical content. The huge context windows allow for a lot of vetted "good" and "bad" witticism bucketing that, with enough to write about, it can almost mimic a light-hearted technical author.

This was fantastic to see after hours of prompt-engineering because it shows me that I can use Gemini to bulldoze rote writing work in other genres, too, which I chip away at until it's almost all my words instead. This is scaffolding and has been around as long as ghost writing has, but until recently, it wasn't usually published so unrefined.

As well as the paragraphs that the generative platforms spit out read when held up against the context that was given, there's no consistency in tone, wording or voice. It may communicate how to use the utility, but it's not communicating the humans behind it.

You still need someone who can own that consistency, that voice, that sense of relatability that drives trust -- these aren't things machines can foster. Not yet, and, probably, not for quite some time.

It's Not A Binary Choice

I get visibly depressed when someone asks me "Which is better .." when it comes to almost anything. The answer is always obvious unless it depends on the circumstances, whatever it is. But I experience people asking this not as a mildly-infuriating way of starting small talk where I do all their thinking for them, but as a decision that they're earnestly struggling with.

"Why not have machines generate most of it and hire a really creative editor to fill in what's needed?" is always my reply, and alarmingly, something they hadn't considered.

It doesn't have to be machines or us, you know! The singularity apocalypse y2k bugs will all still be happy if we work together and use them as a tool instead of looking at everything with eyes for cost elimination. It's not always possible, but please be conscious of the trade-off.

Remembering The Human

We remember the human all the time, from working extra hard to implement great UX in hard places, to auto-saving drafts, to everything else we do as we build things for each other to use in our very clumsy Earth-driven human life experiences. But we can't forget how susceptible we are to an absence of us, that is, not seeing ourselves in places that we ordinarily do.

While true to a lesser extent as compared to how we relax and recreate, we do very much notice and react to the absence of our humanness in our learning too. Documentation and technical writing are learning, even if only a few moments' worth.