AI offers transformative potential for the maritime industry, but it must avoid content overwhelm and ensure that we preserve the human critical thinking skills that remain essential to the sector, writes Ankeeta Munsi.
At Intent Communication’s recent Demystifying Digitalisation and AI roundtable, someone said seafarers have started talking to ChatGPT after a shift. Not for a calculation or a report, but to say the things you wouldn’t say to a tired colleague or to the captain who writes your appraisal.
None of that was possible when I was growing up as the child of a seafarer. A ship then was a place you couldn’t reach. I used to hate missing a call from my dad, because there was no way to call him back. But now that the rest of the world’s hyperconnectivity and instant ‘productivity’ have arrived in maritime, the question the sector should be asking is how can it adapt.
Harnessing advantages
There are real opportunities with the advent of all things AI. I am most interested in the human-interaction aspect as AI can meet a seafarer in their own language, and teach them in a way that fits their culture and unique needs. This counts for a lot on a ship whose crew might be from different continents. Knowing whether a message actually works across all those differences is the hard part.
There are some interesting solutions entering the market to cut across the language and cultural divide. One of these is a tool named Retora, being built by Andras Baneth, to do exactly this, including testing how different groups will react to a message, before it goes out. Imagine that, a piece of training can be tried across cultures, abilities and adjusted before anyone has to sit through it!
AI content overwhelm
However, the trouble is that because ‘AI’ helps you hyper-customise content, it also lets anyone produce endless content with ease. So we make more and more of it – and the more we make, the more generic it gets. There is a word for it now: workslop. This is content that looks like it is thought leadership, but in reality, whoever receives it has to do the thinking the sender skipped. This outsourcing of effort on the part of the AI-enabled creator is a growing trend. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp found that in a single month, 41% of employees had been sent workslop, which had the side effect of making them trust the sender less.
It’s not only about quality, though. There’s also the sheer volume of AI generated content. Sharon O’Dea, who co-founded the digital workplace consultancy Lithos Partners and has just written a book on digital communications at work, told me there is a real sense of overwhelm among employees, because AI makes it so easy to produce a blog or an email that more and more goes out, simply because it can. Her argument is that our information environment now encourages over-production by design, and then tells the overwhelmed to cope better. Employees have finite attention. The answer she points to is not more content and information, it is restraint from the people producing it.
Context matters
The deeper risk is what this level of ease does to us. When something is too easy, we stop learning to do it ourselves. When I spoke with Andras Baneth, he kept returning to this point. Context, he told me, is ‘even more important than the prompts’, and most of it lives in your head, so an AI knows nothing about a real ship unless someone tells it. ‘AI has more to do with self-awareness and self-knowledge than actual technological skill,’ he said. It agrees with you unless you push it to argue, and most people never do. And every time we hand the thinking over, we lose a bit of that muscle.
The perseverance of sitting with a problem until you crack it or the instinct that tells you something is off before you can explain why. These come from experience. The worry that came up again and again was the next generation who might learn to prompt at the expense of learning to think.
Moving forward
None of this is a reason to keep AI out of the industry. In fact it’s a tide that will come in. But used with clarity and purpose, it could make this industry more connected and more humane than it has ever been: training that fits the person, predictive maintenance and real-time rerouting in adverse weather, etc.
The challenge is balancing all of that benefit without giving up what people bring that AI cannot (yet). Our critical thinking, the odd leaps nobody can explain, the gut-based decision that comes from years at sea. This industry still runs because of people, and people have not had an upgrade. We still crave connection, and we can still only take in so much.
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Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
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