When the AI is writing

I thought I would give AI a try and asked it to write the editorial for this issue. I admit that with our ever-growing to-do lists, dwindling time and frozen capacities, we too are increasingly turning to AI for help with various work processes. Strange it may sound, “Terike” is adapting to us more and more. She hasn’t quite got the style right yet and she often makes serious professional mistakes, but in the end we are lucky as otherwise she would write the nearly 300-page Trade magazin in an hour – our only task would be giving her a list of topics…

This article is available for reading in Trade magazin 2025/8-9.

Thank God we aren’t there yet, we write and do the interviews ourselves, we actually contact and speak to the dozens or even hundreds of professionals featured in the magazine, and we are proud that they respond and find it valuable to share their thoughts on the pages of Trade magazin. But I would be lying if I denied that we use AI like an assistant in the old days for many simple tasks, even if the produced results are checked a million times: translate, summarise, create a spreadsheet, make a picture, compare…

But let’s get back to my editorial, for which I asked for a summary of current changes in trade regulations. It began like this: “In Hungary changes in trade regulations are as unpredictable as April showers…” I was reading it with wide eyes. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I wondered where the AI got that from. Had someone else written it and the AI was just quoting them or had it really compared things? May be the AI found so many regulatory changes that it made such a statement? Did it even understand what this actually meant in a system consisting only of 1s and 0s? How could it summarise it so well, with such a good analogy and start with a great punchline? One thing is certain: I never use the April showers analogy – you won’t find it in any of my previous writings.

All in all, the AI did that in six seconds, it listed and commented on several elements of regulatory changes that “simultaneously challenge and encourage us to develop”. These include stricter consumer protection measures, sustainability reporting requirements, changes in online commerce taxation rules, the extension of margin freeze periods, stricter rules on mandatory promotions, new and increasingly digital waste management regulations, new obligations introduced as part of the green transition, such as the expansion of the beverage container return system and modified packaging regulations… I won’t list them all, because there isn’t enough space and everyone is already up to date.

One thing is sure: these and many other important issues will be discussed during the five days of this year’s Business Days conference, from 22 to 26 September, at the Hunguest Hotel Pelion in Tapolca. After take-off the flight captain’s announcements and information will follow, and we won’t land until we have covered every topic and finished every sentence. All the latest information is available at businessdays.hu. We look forward to seeing you there!

Best regards, 

Zsuzsanna Hermann, Editor in Chief