Business Builder: Why Trusting ChatGPT with All of Your Business English Isn’t Smart
2025 might become known as the year that AI became part of everything. It really is becoming available in more and more of the programs we interact with every day. At this point, the majority of businesses already use AI to reduce their menial (simple unskilled) workloads, and one of the most common uses for AI is helping businesses check their business English materials. But with all this increase in AI usage, have any problems or patterns been made clear? Yes, many.
Why AI Causes Problems
To explain things simply, even though AI is intelligent, it does not reason. It looks for information available on the internet, decides if it is related to your question, and sends it to you. It has no idea if it’s correct, and the internet is filled with bad advice and incorrect information.
What AI Could Do to Your Business English
There are limitless ways that using AI to check or write your business English could go horribly wrong, so I’ve gathered together a few examples to show you some of the negative consequences myself and my friends have seen. So grab a cup of tea and some popcorn, and let’s see what you could avoid by not using AI to write your business materials for you.
AI Makes Up Fake Facts
If you let AI write anything for you, it can and will put incorrect information in your Business materials. That could have consequences that range between giving out incorrect details about your business’ opening times to saying that your business was responsible for 9-11, so be careful. The internet is filled with pages with false information, because they are satire (comedy) sites, or written by very strange individuals. Unfortunately AI can’t tell.
AI Makes You Look Racist
A good friend in sales in India told me of a time when a visiting businessman used AI to make his presentation “more Indian”, and the result was just as bad as you are expecting. AI does not understand what is sensitive, what is appreciative, what is insensitive, and what is incredibly racist. The result for this gentleman was a lot of very inappropriate statements that made it look like he was making fun of his Indian business partners. To AI an ‘Indian phrase’ is an Indian phrase, it doesn’t understand stereotypes or how ethnicity can change how a phrase is understood.
AI Creates a Very Inappropriate Tone
Let’s imagine you have a long speech to give on a quite boring topic. You might be tempted to ask AI to make your speech “more fun”. AI does not understand tone, or fun, or that tone and fun are different for different people in different places. This request often results in the AI taking out your appropriate information, and replacing it with so many over-used puns and ‘jolly’ phrases that the logic and meaning of your speech is completely lost.
AI Makes You Break Copyright Law
As AI finds all of its information by searching what is already available on the internet, you have a high chance of breaking copyright law by letting AI take control of your Business materials. The clever rephrasing your AI pal has done for your report might be 100% copied from a published article, and therefore 100% illegal to publish yourself.
AI Stops You Learning and Practicing Your Skills
If your AI friend is writing your materials for you, or even improving them for you, then you aren’t learning or improving your skills. You might be thinking, “What’s the difference between hiring a human to do it for me and using AI for free?”, and the answer would be - using AI is free, but it is also low skill, low accuracy, and it prevents you and your team from developing. Hiring a human, or investing in your own skills, keeps valuable skillsets within your company that can be relied on, and it keeps them in a human being that can reason what is appropriate and what is not.
It’s Obvious when You Use AI
At first this might not seem like a problem, but this is a bigger issue for your business reputation than you might think. I know, within 20 seconds of someone speaking, whether they have used AI in their speech writing. AI uses generic phrases, it doesn’t have a personality, it repeats itself a lot, and it uses a lot of big fancy words that sound good but contain no meaning. The more your presentation includes vague terms like ‘synergy’, ‘throughput’, ‘outreach’, and ‘services’, the more horrible judgemental people like me will think that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not alone in thinking this either. In the past, it was presentation writing by 'Wikitation’, copy and pasting great passages of text from Wikipedia, and now it’s ‘Robotation’. To present yourself as a knowledgeable business associate, you need to demonstrate your understanding and communicate that to your partners. Vague meaningless buzzwords and repetitive phrases lacking personality just don’t do that, and as soon as people recognise these aren’t your words, they won’t trust that you understand your topic.
The Alternative to English Help from AI
I’ve presented you with a lovely long list of problems with using AI, but I’m going to give you helpful solutions as well. Any combination of these alternatives will improve your English language business materials without relying entirely on AI:
Improve your business English skills through self-study, online courses, or a private teacher.
Hire an employee or a freelancer to improve your materials so you have access to reliable and reasoned human intelligence when you need it.
Have your materials proofread by humans with advanced English language skills.
I may be biased (I feel more strongly about one option than another) about which option to choose, but I would recommend improving your own skills. You will always have you, no matter what the future holds, and investing in yourself is always future-proof.
Other Problems with Using AI
While we are here, it is worth noting that by embracing (welcoming) AI, we have suddenly abandoned (dropped and forgotten) our climate agreements. Instead of increasingly moving to renewable energy sources to power the massive databanks required for AI, we are using more and more fossil fuels again. We also waste unbelievable amounts of water cooling those data centres. If the environmental disaster that AI creates doesn’t worry you, the human impact might. Millions of people in third world countries are paid almost nothing to go and manually (by human hand) find the answers people ask AI for, so that when you ask ChatGPT how to make spaghetti bolognaise you get a good recipe. It’s only technically not slavery, but it isn’t much better.
Summing Up
Artificial intelligence isn’t actually very intelligent. The answers are found by human beings and the AI only finds them and repeats them to you. It can’t decide which information is true or false, moral or immoral, or decide what phrases are appropriate. It’s also worth remembering that, to write your presentation, millions of humans are working in horrible conditions and we are speeding up our destruction of the environment.
Using AI to write your business English is a risky thing to do, and I would advise strongly against it.
