If You Wouldn’t Trust It At 35,000 Feet, Don’t Trust It In Your Docs

Here’s a fun little thought experiment for tech writers, doc managers, and the leaders currently saying things like, “Couldn’t AI just do most of this now?”

You’re at the airport. You’ve got your tragic little sandwich in a paper bag, your phone battery is hanging on by a thread, and the gate agent smiles as she scans your boarding pass.

Then she says, almost as an afterthought, “Just so you know, the maintenance procedures, safety documentation, and operating guidance for this aircraft were autogenerated by a large language model. No human reviewed any of it, but the output was looks great.”

Do you keep walking down the jet bridge? Would you really board that plane?

Or do you suddenly decide that maybe this is the perfect time to reconnect with Amtrak.

That, in a nutshell, is the conversation a lot of us are being asked to have about AI-generated technical documentation. Only instead of saying it plainly, some leaders prefer to dress it up in phrases like “content acceleration,” “operational efficiency,” and “reimagining the authoring workflow,” which is executive dialect for “we’re about to try something reckless and would like it to sound visionary.”

The Trouble With Text That Sounds Smart

This is the problem with LLMs. They’re very good at producing language that appears to know what it’s talking about. They sound calm, competent, and confident. They sound like the kind of person who’d use the phrase “best practice” without once stopping to ask whether the practice in question might get someone electrocuted.

And that’s exactly what makes them dangerous in high-stakes documentation environments.