What are the social and economic costs of thousands of people being knocked into precarity, left anxious, depressed, barely housed and fed? All of this, for what? We've been asking that since the 18th century. The Luddites knew exactly how that dehumanized writer feels.
My father, an auto mechanic, once told me that early on (when Ford was a fledgling company) Henry Ford hired workersvat double the going rate! Other businessmen thought he was crazy and would point out that he was wasting money; he could have hired good engineers at half the wages he was offering.
Ford was unapologetic. He pointed out that this got him the best engineers. But even more importantly: “Workers must earn a good salary, otherwise they cannot afford to buy things like my cars.”
Making a fortune by
over-exploiting the working class NEVER ends well. Wealth must be distributed sufficiently else revolutions occur. Little events (Boston Tea Party, anyone?) can have far-reaching effects. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings can be the final straw that starts a hurricane half-way around the world.
Whew! What a bleak survey--the first one was the worst. Makes you wonder...what do the people running things think will happen if their dreams come true and they can fire everyone? Or is there no one running things, just a million managers each thinking , "Hey I can save money..."
These stories hurt. It's just brutal. It's something I constantly think about in the context of risks from AI, especially existential risks; EVERYDAY LIFE is ALREADY an existential risk for a large fraction of people in society, and AI is making the situation a lot worse. I don't know if we will even have time for the EXISTENTIAL existential risks to become a meaningful problem.
It's a tough, but not unprecedented, situation. See the old book “Who Moved My Cheese.”
If AI-generated copy and content generate results equal to or better than human-generated equivalents far faster at a fraction of the cost, there's no business case for the latter. If not, the market will resolve the issue.
This time may be different though. If the trend continues across a material proportion of the job market, it may threaten the entire capitalist economic and political infrastructure that has served us so well for so long.
Stories like this are dry kindling for a socialist firestorm.
It is all well and good to document the problem, but it would be better to discuss solutions.
I got laid off at the end of October—I was blindsided even though they had asked me to do some projects with AI I wasn’t quite comfortable with and were talking about using AI to make images for pennies each (when I would have been the one taking photos). I had been there for six years part time while in school and while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go next, the reality check that AI is being used for all the things I did in my job was sobering.
Editing AI slop is a hiding to nothing. It will take much longer than it should before non-writers understand that LLMs can’t magically generate the new information/inputs that copywriters source all the time for their work, and that prompts are not the same thing.
LLMs also can’t evaluate or respond to reader/customer feedback apart from a rudimentary guesstimate of whether it contains positive or negative words.
Vast oceans of slop will be published while the human readership dwindles to nothing. Eventually organisations will notice a resulting drop in sales/responses, but it will be too late for the humble copywriters like me, forced into unemployment.
What are the social and economic costs of thousands of people being knocked into precarity, left anxious, depressed, barely housed and fed? All of this, for what? We've been asking that since the 18th century. The Luddites knew exactly how that dehumanized writer feels.
My father, an auto mechanic, once told me that early on (when Ford was a fledgling company) Henry Ford hired workersvat double the going rate! Other businessmen thought he was crazy and would point out that he was wasting money; he could have hired good engineers at half the wages he was offering.
Ford was unapologetic. He pointed out that this got him the best engineers. But even more importantly: “Workers must earn a good salary, otherwise they cannot afford to buy things like my cars.”
Making a fortune by
over-exploiting the working class NEVER ends well. Wealth must be distributed sufficiently else revolutions occur. Little events (Boston Tea Party, anyone?) can have far-reaching effects. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings can be the final straw that starts a hurricane half-way around the world.
Whew! What a bleak survey--the first one was the worst. Makes you wonder...what do the people running things think will happen if their dreams come true and they can fire everyone? Or is there no one running things, just a million managers each thinking , "Hey I can save money..."
i think it's excellent that you are giving voice to the harms. we need to know the lay of the land. thank you.. keep it up.
These stories hurt. It's just brutal. It's something I constantly think about in the context of risks from AI, especially existential risks; EVERYDAY LIFE is ALREADY an existential risk for a large fraction of people in society, and AI is making the situation a lot worse. I don't know if we will even have time for the EXISTENTIAL existential risks to become a meaningful problem.
It's a tough, but not unprecedented, situation. See the old book “Who Moved My Cheese.”
If AI-generated copy and content generate results equal to or better than human-generated equivalents far faster at a fraction of the cost, there's no business case for the latter. If not, the market will resolve the issue.
This time may be different though. If the trend continues across a material proportion of the job market, it may threaten the entire capitalist economic and political infrastructure that has served us so well for so long.
Stories like this are dry kindling for a socialist firestorm.
It is all well and good to document the problem, but it would be better to discuss solutions.
I got laid off at the end of October—I was blindsided even though they had asked me to do some projects with AI I wasn’t quite comfortable with and were talking about using AI to make images for pennies each (when I would have been the one taking photos). I had been there for six years part time while in school and while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go next, the reality check that AI is being used for all the things I did in my job was sobering.
Editing AI slop is a hiding to nothing. It will take much longer than it should before non-writers understand that LLMs can’t magically generate the new information/inputs that copywriters source all the time for their work, and that prompts are not the same thing.
LLMs also can’t evaluate or respond to reader/customer feedback apart from a rudimentary guesstimate of whether it contains positive or negative words.
Vast oceans of slop will be published while the human readership dwindles to nothing. Eventually organisations will notice a resulting drop in sales/responses, but it will be too late for the humble copywriters like me, forced into unemployment.