I stared at Tim Soulo, oblivious to the spell he was weaving around me. For years, I had been paying US$99 monthly, to use the Ahrefs software he was marketing. This time, he was speaking at the Ahrefs Mini Evolve conference.
I sat there, shellshocked at the information he was presenting to me.
I was surprised. Use ChatGPT for a few times, and you might be surprised at the quality of answers that come out, even though what it is is just a predictive autofill, similar to what Google does with autofilling your search.
ChatGPT just predicts your next word.
And when you look at the power of generative AI, some think that writing is no longer useful. After all, why spend time, tense in your chair, hunched over the laptop, trying to think of the right turn of phrase, when all you need to do is key in a prompt into AI?
As a writer, one existential question I’ve been grappling with is,
am I bound for extinction?
And more widely around the communication agency I’ve built is an equally important question,
do we have to sack everyone?
Should we all find different jobs?
But as I sat listening to Tim, some insights started popping in my head.
People don’t just want answers, they still want good answers
If you see the amount of people that still use Google for answers, what you might realise is this.
People don’t just want answers that can roll off ChatGPT’s tongue.
They want good answers that have been upranked by Google’s algorithms.
Google’s greatest innovation was PageRank, which introduced the idea of backlinks. In the first days of search, any webpage that stuffed itself with keywords suddenly found itself top of the search results. What Google did was to introduce the idea of backlinks, an idea they took from the field of academia. In academia, if a paper is widely cited, it’s considered impactful.
In the same way, if a page had many other pages linking to it, Google saw it as a sign of its authoritativeness. This dramatically increased the quality of search results.
You could not just have a webpage chockfull of keywords. You had to create unique value, that others would refer to.
Use ChatGPT enough, and you quickly realise that even the same prompt doesn’t always give the same answer. How can that be, given that some of these questions should have straightforward answers?
But Google, with its AI overview, sums up an overview by using sources that have been upvoted, and had more backlinks, resulting in the quality of the results being significantly better than that of ChatGPT.
What it does show is that people still look for answers they can trust.
And whatever your job, you will need to write in a way that earns you trust.
How do you communicate in a trustworthy manner?
How do you communicate in a way so that people trust the answers you give? And so that they will buy what you sell, invest thousands of their hard-earned money in you, or even entrust you with their family fortunes?
You might think this sounds ridiculous. But let me introduce to you the humble annual report, or the one everyone seems to miss.
Annual reports move millions and billions of dollars daily. Retail investors, the uncle and auntie make these decisions without meeting the management, buying based on what they read through these annual reports. Worse still, they might be making these based on their friend’s insights.
In fact, let me show you how DBS Bank, the biggest bank in Singapore, did their annual report in a way that convinced people to pay ever higher premiums for their stock.
Isn’t that what we want? For people to trust us so much just based on what we write, that they pay thousands to buy into your company.
You might not be a listed company today, but you would definitely need to communicate to achieve certain outcomes.
Let’s see what we can learn from DBS’ 2023 Annual Report, a masterclass in writing and editing.
If we look at what they did through the lens of Tong Yee’s trust model, we would see that DBS did all four components.
Competence, the understated sauce
But what I would like to pull out here is how they showed their competence in a world that was becoming increasingly volatile.
In a world of ChatGPT, where so much information is at your fingertips, it can be very difficult to differentiate between those who know what they say, and those who simply say what they know.
After all, you could tell ChatGPT to prepare you answers to an interview, memorise most of the answers, and spout them back out to the interviewer.
And so in a world that has more access to information than ever before, the clear differentiator is competence. You can execute what you say you can do.
That’s tough.
But DBS has done it year in year out, achieving record earnings, record ROEs, and simply showing that their earnings were not juiced by any quick hacks.
There was a real structural change.
And when we communicate today, rather than just regurgitating what we’ve read, maybe the next best thing to do is to introduce a new insight, that forces people to think,
Oh, I’ve never thought of it that way before.
And maybe then, you’d find yourself in a special place, where people trust, and keep trusting you.
What does this look like? For example, for me, I’ve still insisted on writing from scratch, rather than prompting AI to give me answers. I’ve focused on understanding the fields I focus on as much as possible, trying to build unique, new insights and present them in a way that people have not seen before.
We focus on interviewing and learning from experts so that we can present the best insights that our readers can use.
None of this is easy. It takes time. But when information is at your fingertips, what we do need today are insights. And insights can’t be churned through AI.
They can only be slowly understood.