Again, half as long

I promised I’d follow up with my thoughts on the dueling versions of the AI-edited Prime Video email I shared in this most recent post. Did Bard or ChatGPT produce the better email?

A couple important caveats: Remember. I asked each AI tool to produce a more concise version of an email that I provided. My prompt did not ask for original content. A truer test of their capabilities would be to simply feed them the basic facts (We’re going to start including ads in Prime Video, the fees will not increase, you can level up to an ad-free option, etc.) and ask to write an email from there. I have indeed used both chatbots in other circumstances to develop original content. I certainly didn’t copy it verbatim, or pass it off as my own, but it was a useful tool to help me organize my thoughts.

Nonetheless, this experiment demonstrated the value of AI chatbots as editors. Both new versions, in my opinion, contained the essential facts and pared content that I thought was extraneous. They mirrored the structure of the original, which I thought was the correct choice.

All in all, I prefered the Bard version. It was a bit too upbeat, given that the purpose was to deliver what most Prime members would regard as bad news. But it also sounded more human, with more of a voice. I also like that it suggested a subject line, a request that was not included in the prompt. There is no reason why corporate communicators should not adopt these tools more widely to save ourselves time, help us brainstorm ideas, and fine-tine our messages. We are, after all, only human.