I’m a little worried about AI these days. Most of my work right now is not new creation, but adjusting existing materials and ideas for a specific purpose — cutting 500 words of copy to 250, writing a teaser paragraph to get people to download a whitepaper, and so on. AI could do some of that for me, which would be convenient until it could do all of that for me, at which point I’d be out of a job.
Sci-Fi: maybe someday in the future technology will automate all the boring things in life so everyone can focus on their artistic endeavours
Reality: okay so we’ve successfully automated all art so nobody should be distracted from their boring jobs anymore — Roger O’Sullivan (@RogerOSullivan) December 12, 2022
Noah Smith is optimistic, noting that “dystopia is when robots take half your jobs. Utopia is when robots take half your job.” In other words, AI could automate the annoying parts of our work and let us get to the good parts. He imagines that his writing will now be making a list his ideas, having an AI churn out a first draft of a column, and then revising to suit. Unfortunately, he’s one of the lucky few whose job requires original thinking. And honestly, his ideas are already written down. ChatGPT could already remix existing Noah Smith columns to create a “new” one on most economic, social, or technological topics.
As Today in Tabs puts it:
It’s very funny for a professional writer to admit that his job is to come up with some ideas and then encase them in low-value bullshit that a bot could generate, but I do think he’s right, and that generating necessary bullshit is the worst part of many jobs. Writing grants, writing software project proposals, writing pitch decks—lots of jobs consist of coming up with an idea and then coating it in bullshit of a particular format. Lawyers do almost nothing else. A lot of people could nearly eliminate the worst parts of their job with a good bullshit generator, as long as everyone just stays cool and pretends we’re not all using AI to do that. So don’t be a narc.
I’ve tried making ChatGPT write some copy for me. It was able to accurately explain the difference between coordination of benefits and subrogation among insurers (coordination is when you figure out which insurer to bill; subrogation is when one insurer pays a bill and then makes another pay it back). I asked it to write one of this year’s Princeton college application essay supplements, about community service (it says grew up in rural Pennsylvania and identifies specific on-campus service organizations it would like to join). Asked “In 50 words or less, what song represents the soundtrack to your life right now?” it responded:
“The Climb” by Miley Cyrus – a reminder to keep pushing forward and never give up, no matter how hard the journey may be.
It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to make me think about yet another career pivot aimed at either using AI to generate my marketing bullshit exponentially faster, or developing a brand of hand-crafted artisanal bullshit that I can sell for a higher price.
Negative creep
- Chronicle of Higher Education: Do professors have a right to mistreat students? Apparently it’s OK to insult your students if you’re a Christian.
- Politico: Is “common-good constitutionalism” a totalitarian nightmare, or an exciting new legal theory? A Harvard legal theorist thinks it’s time to drop the Federalist Society’s charade of originalism and start legislating theocracy.
- Salon: Christian nationalists shocked to find racism, antisemitism, and misogyny in their movement. Shocked, I tell you.
Born in the USA
- Bon Appétit: What’s the true cost of a fried chicken sandwich?
- Hell World: A touching tribute to the late Mimi Parker, of the band Low.
- NYT: The exceptionally American problem of rising road deaths.
- National Interest: Has the next civil war already started?
- The Nation: How the NYPD manufactures convictions (TLDR: illegally)
I think it’s kinda funny, I think it’s kinda sad
- McSweeney’s: Middle school party games revised for grownups (darkly humorous)
- Aeon: What Andrea Dworkin Missed About Pornography (scholarly, almost disappointingly not sexy)
- Max Read: A review of a truly bizarre small smartphone (somehow hilarious, trust me)
- PShares: Rereading Gibson’s The Peripheral and thinking about a slow-motion apocalypse (again, trust me)
John Wick except it’s Gonzo and the mob just killed one of his chickens — @popeawesomexiii@mstdn.party (@PopeAwesomeXIII) December 3, 2022
Secretly Ironic 