I recently wrote a piece for LinkedIn about the dangers of tech companies using AI to write their social media posts, blogs and more. But the practice is probably even more prevalent in tango, and it potentially poses an even bigger danger.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll start by quoting the introductory paragraphs of my LinkedIn piece, because these apply equally to the tango world …

We’ve all seen it: social media posts, blog posts, web copy, press releases, and much more where it’s painfully obvious that the copy was ‘written’ by an AI rather than a person.

There are the immediate giveaways. The absurd over-use of em dashes, like the LLM bought them in a closing-down sale and has to use them all before they expire on Tuesday. The one-sentence paragraphs, as if the AI is bonused on the use of carriage-returns. The inability to say what anything is without first saying what it isn’t (perhaps each example of correctio gets the chatbot a bit more RAM). The “Here’s the thing nobody tells you” preamble to statements of the obvious. I could go on, as could you, I’m sure.

These AI tics signal to many of us that we needn’t waste time reading any further. The “If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?” response. (Or “ai;dr” if you’re rather younger than me.)

That’s the first danger: you’re telling your audience there’s no point in reading this particular post, because it’s just AI slop.

But the bigger danger is what happens when you post a succession of these. That signals that you are no longer writing anything of your own, and that your social media channel is now nothing more than a conduit for AI drivel. At that point, what many people will do is unfollow or simply skip straight past. So the next time you do have something real to write, there will be far fewer people left to read it.

In case you think this is theoretical, it’s absolutely not, and you can find the hard data here. But it’s also backed by my own experience and that of friends I’ve spoken with about it. We’ve stopped reading posts by many tango names because those people have stopped writing them.

This includes some very well-known names whose posts I used to read religiously and now mostly skip past. There are literally people publishing self-published books written by AI!

The other thing worth knowing from the study I cite is that the effect accelerates over time. Something that was a small problem last year is a big one this year and will be killing tango businesses by next year. You may see it as a time-saver, but the risk is that you may end up having rather more time on your hands than desired …