Lawyers put warranty disclaimers in capitals so you’ll notice them. Then nobody reads them. Here’s why ALL CAPS slows your reader down, where “upper case” comes from, and when shouting is ever worth it.

One of the pioneers of speech recognition is said to have joked that his system got better every time he fired a linguist. He had a point. So why should a linguist have anything to say about AI now?

“The system flagged it.” “The algorithm declined it.” “AI decided.” Notice who’s missing from every one of those sentences.

The risk with AI isn’t that it’s too smart or too stupid. It’s that it’s both, often in the same answer, and it sounds exactly the same either way.

Finish this sentence: the cat sat on the… You just did what AI does, and understanding that is the most useful thing anyone can know about it.

Most arguments about AI are really arguments about words. “Intelligent”, “understands”, “thinks” and “hallucinates” are doing a lot of work, and very little of it is precise.

Everyone left the meeting agreeing to be “customer-centric”. Six months later, sales, operations and finance are still fighting about what it meant.

The most dangerous document in your organisation isn’t the badly written one. It’s the beautifully written one that nobody can explain.