Artificial Intelligence

A year of writing about AI led me back to one central idea: staying human is a choice. This year-end reflection explores human-centred AI, communication, ethics, and the judgement required as AI moves from abstraction to everyday reality.

AI is already superhuman. What’s still uncertain is whether our organisations and institutions are ready to use that power in ways that strengthen, rather than diminish, our humanity.

AI can invent sources, quotes, and links with total confidence. If it touched your content, verification is no longer optional. Editors must now be fact-checkers. This is no longer best practice. It is the baseline.

What began with a post about the em dash became a conversation about much more – how we think about voice, authenticity and the human mind in an AI-shaped world. The comments revealed concerns about something deeper - not about punctuation, but about identity and how we choose to sound.

The first cyberattack executed primarily by an autonomous AI isn’t hypothetical – it has already happened. Anthropic’s investigation shows how attackers manipulated Claude into running a full espionage campaign, marking a shift in how threats emerge, operate, and scale.

Vibe coding is changing how we create, shifting software from something we write to something we discuss. As AI becomes a collaborator, the real challenge is helping people use this new power responsibly – and communicators have a central role to play.

ChatGPT now promises to stop using em dashes when instructed, ending a surprisingly noisy debate over a tiny punctuation mark. But the real story is how AI picked up the em dash from us in the first place – and what that says about voice, trust and the way we write today.

A credible primer that treats AI as a collaborator, not a shortcut. This LinkedIn Learning course from Microsoft's Frank Shaw and Elaine Chang shows communicators how to create a simple mindset to experiment responsibly, save time and raise quality. It’s also free until 31 December 2025.