Jack Molisani: The Impact of AI on Technical Communication – Episode 30

Jack Molisani As the founder of the long-standing LavaCon conference and the principal at a technical content staffing agency, Jack Molisani gets a deeply informed view of the world of technical communication. While he sees the opportunities that generative AI presents, he raises several concerns for technical content strategy practitioners, among them the inaccuracy of generative AI content and the inability of AI tools to comprehend subtle human communication clues. We talked about: his work as the Executive Director of the LavaCon Content Strategy Conference and at ProSpring Staffing, a technical communication job agency how a change in the LinkedIn messaging interface inspired him to spend more time at in-person events his observation that many product features that are promoted as "AI" are actually capabilities that have been around for years his concerns about the ability to identify and vet the sources that AI tools cite his assessment of the job prospects for technical communicators in 2024 his exasperation with the decline in quality of applicant tracking systems (ATS) some of the tasks in technical communication that AI can help with the inability of AI tools to account for subtle human communication dynamics like facial expressions how using AI writing tools can misrepresent your own writing ability how a speed networking event that troubled introverts at a prior LavaCon led to the introduction of calming therapy animals at the event, including a therapy llama Jack's bio Jack Molisani is the President of ProSpring Staffing, an employment agency specializing in content professionals (both contract and perm). He's the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon's Career and Resume Best Seller list. The first printing is sold out. Watch for a soon-to-be-released second edition. Jack also produces The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy, which contains an AI track. The 2024 conference is 27–30 October in Portland, Oregon. Register using referral code LSPODCAST for $200 off in-person tuition. Connect with Jack online LinkedIn LavaCon content strategy conference Prospring Staffing Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/RsgY89El1Aw Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 30. The rise of generative AI affects every type of content practice, including the venerable institution of technical communication. Jack Molisani runs both a tech comms staffing agency and the annual LavaCon content strategy conference, which he's organized for more than 20 years. Jack brings a deeply informed perspective to the conversation around the introduction of AI into content practice, especially its impact on employment prospects for technical communicators. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 30 of the Content and AI Podcast. I'm really excited today to welcome to the show Jack Molisani. Jack is a legend in the textbook, communication, and technical content strategy world. He's the executive director of the LavaCon Content Strategy Conference. He also runs a staffing agency called ProSpring Staffing. Welcome, Jack. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Jack: Wow, okay. As you said, I'm running around two spheres. One is producing the LavaCon Conference in content strategy. The other one is running a staffing agency for technical writers and other content professionals. Although we also have a division that does engineers, and there's some crossover there. What's interesting, and it's almost a side note but since you asked what I've been up to, is I've discovered that it's almost impossible for me to land new staffing clients over the internet anymore. Larry: Interesting. What's going on there? Jack: It used to be that someone would post a job on LinkedIn, and I'd wait two weeks. If it's still there I said, "Hey, could you use some help finding someone?" And they'll tell me yes or no. Jack: Well, a couple things happened. One is LinkedIn bifurcated your message inbox. It now has two labels, focused and other. It didn't announce this. Suddenly, all my responses were going to other and I thought I had an empty inbox. Where once I discovered this other tab, had people responding to me for two years saying, "Yes, we need help." Larry: Oh, God. Jack: By then, they don't need help anymore. Two, LinkedIn opened an API so people could use tools to email thousands of people at a time. Suddenly, mine and every other inbox is just filled with spam. Trying to weed all through that to find the real communication piece. And then, they added a third option on their reply screen, a pre-populated answer that says, "Thanks, we're not interested. Thanks, call me. Thanks, but not interested," and delete without responding. Larry: Oh. Jack: Now managers just go out and delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. Not even saying, "No, I'm good," or, "Yes, please." Jack: I have discovered that I'm going old school and meeting people in-person. I've been going to trade shows. I just got back from a software engineering trade show yesterday. It's going to come back to that when we talk about AI in a second. And a manufacturing trade show two weeks ago. Two weeks from now, I'm going to a semiconductor trade show, just to go around to talk to people in-person. Going, "Hi, I'm Jack Molisani. Here's my card. If you don't need me now, maybe you'll need me in the future." I'm guessing people who have their own technical writing services or are independent contractors are like that. Jack: The other thing I've seen is now, on LinkedIn, where people post a job, it now tells you how many people have applied for that job. So within a half-hour, it says 100 people applied for this job already. You go, "Really?" A friend of mine said, "No. What really that means is 100 people clicked on the job to read it. They didn't necessarily apply for it." Larry: Interesting. Jack: I just don't trust anything I read anymore. Larry: Yeah. Jack: We've come to that point. They said it was coming, it's here. Larry: The reason I wanted to have you on this podcast specifically is because this is the new one, about AI. When we first talked, we were talking about your journey into AI. But I'm going to just jump way ahead. I think my prediction is that one of the outcomes of this is going to be a return to human connection. Here you are, exhibiting it already, going out to conferences. Thanks for validating my prediction. Larry: I'm assuming you can't ignore AI in your line of work. Both just the technical communication part of it, the programming for LavaCon. I'm assuming it's invaded your life like everyone else. Is that a safe assumption? Jack: We do have a track. Last year's LavaCon, when everyone was talking about LavaCon, it was the main theme of the conference. I observed a trend, if I may. What was it? Four years ago, everyone going, "Chatbots! Chatbots. The future of tech comm is chatbots." Next year, crickets. Year after that, "Oh my God, VR, the Metaverse. Everyone's going to be in the Metaverse." Next year, crickets. Now we're going, "AI! AI! AI!" I'm going, "Hm." Jack: I don't think we're going to get quite to cricket level on AI, but I already know that, in my conference, that it's not the main focus this year. We have an AI track, yeah. Sure. Because you got to know what's coming, what's available, what you can and can't do with it. But we're going back to the basics, treating content as a business asset that you can use to reduce costs or generate revenue. Back to basics. Larry: Yeah. That came up. I just dropped an episode of the other podcast, Content Strategy Insights yesterday, with a woman at Albert Heijn, the big grocery chain here in the Netherlands. One of her big accomplishments there was getting the enterprise to view content as an asset. I said, "Wow. How did you do that?" I love that that's a focus of yours as well. Larry: But, tell me. You're obviously not a rah-rah person. Tell me how you see AI fitting into tech comms and tech content strategy. What do you think? There are some things that are proving to be useful to people, but I gather that you perceive a lot of hype as well. Jack: Yes. More of the latter, less of the former. Or it's just not quite here yet. A couple stories on this. I can see a perfect application of AI in tech comm. Take a company like Boeing, who has 10 million pages of documentation in their content management system. Scan that whole dataset, find out how many of those pages are sufficiently similar that we can combine them, and reuse it, and maintain only one source. Brilliant use of AI. Jack: Or take your legacy documentation. If it's structured using headings, break each heading into a separate topic. Automatically add, populate the meta tags. I'm assuming your audience knows what meta tags are. Then repost that as chunked, individual content pieces. Brilliant use, I can see that. Jack: What I'm seeing now, however, is every single tool vendor in every single industry or trade show I've gone to is like, "Our tool is AI enabled." One of them was a content management system. I was talking with one of their people. I said, "Hey, that's great. Show me something in your tool that's AI." She goes, "If you create a new topic, we will pre-populate the XML for you." I said, "Hmm. First of all, that's called a wizard and we've had them for decades. What about your tool is artificial intelligence?" She couldn't tell me. She said, "Oh, let me get back to the developer." True story. Absolutely true story. Larry: Interesting. Jack: I think what's happening is a lot of these tools, they want to be seen as up-to-date and, "We're just as AI as they are.