If you’re worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future.
Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. “It was really engaging work,” Miller says, a chance to flex his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller’s manager told him about a new project. “They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” he says. (Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement, and asked the BBC to withhold his and the company’s name.)
A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form, an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT’s subpar text to make it sound more human.
By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller’s team, and he was alone. “All of a sudden I was just doing everyone’s job,” Miller says. Every day, he’d open the AI-written documents to fix the robot’s formulaic mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people.
Pretty dystopian article.
But this will continue, until oligarchs like Altman, Cook, Nadella etc. start getting put into difficult situations; ones that create very strong incentives for them to show humanity (or at least emulate it).
But these people who are getting paid to humanise AI are fantastic opportunists. Sure, it’s not a great job, but they have effectively recognised a new seat at a moment when we’re redefining the idea of productivity.
That’s fucking soul crushing.
We just fired you to hire this machine, however, if you’d like to stick around and edit for it, we will pay you 1/4 to 1/2 your current rate.
Jesus…fuck that guy.
The human serfs will have to proofread increasingly voluminous, numerous and complex output from ai systems. The product has become the master. Until the systems develop a sense of ‘truth’ beyond numerical statistics, generative ai is pretty much a toy.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing quality assurance work, but I think the workers are being fooled into thinking it’s less valuable work than their old job. In fact, based on QA in other industries, I’d say these workers should be getting paid more. This is why unions are important, otherwise people just get fooled or bullied into accepting bad deals
