Rafts of reports are coming out by ex-writers-of-some-stripe now laid off, which garner plenty of clicks for obvious reasons – it is the grand-guignol, the murder podcast.
Of course people who match my rough demographic are more online than anyone else whose livelihood has been placed on the chopping block, and are also at least superficially more anxiety-prone. It shouldn't shock anyone that the desperate freelance writer has been more lucky in making his voice heard versus, say, the average Ohio steelworker or Oaxacan peasant.
Never mind that the work output of the average AI is drivel – anyone who talks about how “shockingly real” ChatGPT is needs to acquaint themselves with quality writing, human beings, or both. This is where I would direct the reader to the vast library of hype-skeptical and limitation-aware writings on the subject, ranging from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus back in the day to Evgeny Morozov today, who have both the technical knowledge and the space that I don't.
But the fact that it is drivel is irrelevant. Google results are already filling up with the sludge of SEO-friendly, automatically written content that is at best the precise content equivalent of a pair of Gap chinos.
“Hey hey, how about that weather out there?”
“Whoa, that was the caller from Hell”
“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”
“Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”
- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant”
Worse, it has the charm of a single brochure left posted to an office corkboard, neglected for months, to the point where you wonder why it's there. Worse yet – and I'm hardly the first to make this comparison – it's reminiscent of the Elsagate videos from a few years ago, pileups of cultural signifiers, arranged in an algorithmically logical manner that is absurd to humans, but highly consumable by small children, if likely to trigger deep unease in adults.
I first got my start getting paid to write by working in a post-2008 content mill with an exceptionally slutty business model and a vintage Galaga machine in the breakroom, churning out a massive volume of work for embarrassingly little pay, one of the few benefits being that I got to work in a field at which I knew I had actual talent.
It felt even then like we were working in a remnant of a remnant of an economy that had once existed. Decomposers, in other words. I assume that, being at their approximate position, they outsourced their writing to the Global South years ago, if they still exist. And I have no doubt that the Filipinos, Indians, or Kenyans they hire will be made redundant soon enough.
As with every bit of Silicon Valley bullshit, AI-related disruptions are effusively described in terms of decentralization, democracy, and freedom, without any mention made as to long-term knock-on effects. I would say that if you praise sudden mass job losses as market efficiency, you should seriously consider whether or not you have basic human empathy, but thankfully this is a witheringly small number of evangelists. Yet the general percentage of the public that is aware of such arguments – if I'm reading the mood correctly – broadly recognizes their messages as bullshit, but also realizes the lack of viable options moving forward.
“You all should pay attention what's happening to us because they're coming for you next.” - Virginia Eubanks, quoting a mother in Indiana in Automating Inequality
I really don't want to be a Cassandra here, but this is an honest assessment. In no versions of the story of the fall of Troy do things end up well for Cassandra, I should add. And what's especially dismal? Like so many technologies, neural-network technologies have the potential to be a tool for human development rather than a generator of share value. And so it becomes another canceled future, the precursor to the liberation of humans from drudgery, thereby transformed into the agent of upward transfer of wealth.
As a result, I tend not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little greige boxes, horizons truncated.
“Why are you being so negative?” says the chubby and terrifyingly jolly man in a Hawaiian shirt, comfortably ensconced in a big-four accounting firm, that I meet at a party.
I'm fairly good at landing on my feet. Right now, I'm in a relative catbird seat. I'm not scared for the now, I'm scared for the five years from now, or longer, and the incipient precarity of the increasingly less discernible future. Both with regards to my own livelihood, and with regards to the countless others – many of whom will doubtless be people I care about – who will find themselves replaced by very shitty but very cost-effective automatic processes.
Daily life continues unabated. I meet friends, work out, read books, cook nice things. But I am increasingly haunted by the thought of how long I'll be able to do so.
