On AI Preview…
AI might have an unintended effect on content preview. Stick with me for a second here –
Optimizely tools have supported in-context preview for a long time. Our CMS will let you see what your content looks like in any channel or device, and more recently, our CMP does the same thing.
But I’m starting to wonder about “Preview for AI.”
When we preview content, we’re always asking ourselves, “how will this content look like to X?” For example, “How will this content look like to a Spanish speaker who has visited before and is on a mobile device?”
Do we now need to ask, “How will content look to AI?”
For example, should we have our content summarized by AI before we publish so we can see what it will look like when a visitor does that same thing? That’s a valid form of “preview,” right? Might we then make changes to it so that it summarizes better, much like we might change the spacing to make sure something looks good on a mobile device?
Is this responsive …content? Responsive …meaning? Responsive …cognition? Do we need to start writing in a different way to make sure our message comes through when our words are inevitably re-arranged by AI?
When responsive web design became a thing, it was a little jarring because we had always controlled the visual container. Suddenly, we didn’t, and we had to adapt to whatever container our design was poured into and re-arranged by. So we started previewing for different visual containers.
But we still controlled the actual words …until we didn’t. Now we’re pouring our words into the “cognitive container” of an AI which is gonna re-arrange them. Do we need to start previewing how those AIs will perceive them?
We’ve now moved from uncontrollable VISUAL containers to uncontrollable COGNITIVE containers. Are we ready for this?
(LinkedIn will now summarize posts for you. Go ahead, have LI summarize this post – I have no control over what it does, and AI is non-deterministic, so you might all see something different. Let me know if you think it was accurate, or if I might have benefited from “cognitive preview.”)