I feel like I could make fun of “Something Big is Happening” forever. Sure, the tasteless loser who would choose that grotesquely basic header image written in a fake handwriting font that looks like the text generated by a digital document signature software WOULD believe machines can develop taste.
As a teacher I was most offended by “knowledge is basically free now, for only $20 a month” line about an “infinitely patient” tutor who can “explain at any level” - one of many fantasies in this piece and based in a belief that teaching is merely “explaining.” Also very rich to think you will somehow distinguish yourself professionally in a positive way by using AI tools because “no one is doing this” when in fact AI tools are ubiquitously available because they have been forcefully embedded with no opt-out in almost every part of our digital landscape. Even the examples he mentioned about law fail to mention that lawyers are routinely being sanctioned for citing case law that doesn’t exist because they or their staff used AI to write a brief. 404 media has good journalistic coverage of these incidents and other impacts of AI on workplaces, like “workslop” submitted by employees using AI having the effect of creating more work for others on their team, who have to try to parse and clean up the AI generated mess.
Like you mentioned, considering the politics of AI boosters is important. They almost never acknowledge the intellectual theft at mind boggling scale or the low wage training labor in places like Kenya that these models were built on. They fail utterly to consider the ethical, emotional, and material realms of being human. People who believe human labor will shortly be rendered useless by AI are usually not doing much of the labor that sustains their lives themselves.
On robots doing physical labor - I recommend the 2008 film “Sleep Dealer” - very prescient sci-fi that also has a lot to say about immigration.
I'm a software engineer, and the last few months have been pretty miserable. It's not that AI can now do my entire job and I'm sitting around doing nothing, but there's been a significant shift in the expectations of my role that has sucked the fun, creativity, and satisfaction out of solving complex problems or building something. The people going off on twitter always have an agenda, they’re rarely the ones in the weeds working in extremely complex codebases or connected to the problems that often arise when you try to ship code that hasn’t been thoughtfully considered. To act like AI tools aren’t still making basic mistakes and don’t need to be guided and instructed makes me feel like i’m being gaslit!!
Of course there are aspects of coding that are formulaic, and AI tools can be given more and more context and clearer guidelines for what’s good/what’s bad. Humans often make mistakes too. But the people controlling where things are headed are the “progress at any and all cost” kind of dudes, with 0 consideration for the real costs this technology will have on people and society (not to mention $$$) and it feels like we’re all at the mercy of their choices.
So interesting. I am in a programming-heavy area but not a software engineer and the pressure in the past few months to churn things out with minimal checks and thought is real. That said I am worried for what it will mean for my role in future
A lot of my work is editorial for brands — writing, videos, podcasts — and a lot of my clients are VCs. For a while it seemed like my job would be the first to be replaced by AI. A few years in, and I’ve noticed two things: my skills have never been more in demand or more expensive in the most AI-cozy companies, and the people who have the most to gain from people using AI — the people investing in the models — are the first to dismiss any final product that’s too clearly been made with AI as slop. They don’t mind if an unformed idea or outline has been clearly run through AI, but there’s a real aversion to any final product that looks too AI-made or polished. Even the people betting on this technology haven’t squared the paradox of what it’s doing to our sense of value: the more AI produces, the more the perceived value of anything made by AI plummets.
On a philosophical level, I think AI may prompt the end of rationalism. I think we tend to overestimate how much of the humans experience is intelligence and underestimate how much is consciousness (i.e., bodily experience first). But intelligence — whether human or machine — is just a random content generator. Intelligence decoupled from an actual experience of being a body and person in the world is fine, kind of useful, but not a replacement for people. It’s dense, but I highly recommend Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty! Read it this fall and it all felt more relevant than ever.
Final note: since understanding what’s happening in tech is an unfortunate side effect of my work, I’d recommend reading Benedict Evans and ignoring pretty much everything on X! He’s a great writer and clear thinker who’s very even-keeled — I feel like thanks to him, I have an actual framework to understand what’s happening as it does.
same experience here. They've been telling me for 3 years that my role as a copywriter will go away, ahem, tomorrow. And yet, I'm paid more today, sought-after more, and turn away job requests monthly because I don't have the capacity. The response? "It's so hard to find good writers! Let us know if your schedule changes at any time."
And yeah, we're all using the latest versions of ChatGPT on the *paid* plan and yeah, it still sucks at writing, even writing for sales and marketing purposes. It's empty, same-same, and customers don't like it. The only CEOs outsourcing marketing creative completely to AI (like firing staff and replacing them with machines) are those who have never cared about quality or understood what it looks like and why it matters to their bottom line, the cost-cutting-at-all-costs sort.
Will this change? Maybe! But I don't think my saving grace will learn how to use a tool that everyone in my field already knows how to use extensively (because it's pretty fucking simple, ha).
Completely agree with everything you just said. I think it’s because no matter how good AI gets or will get, it’s still probabilistic (i.e., better AI just means better averages) and great writing is deterministic. It’s highly specific.
And all of the sycophants saying the most important thing to do in writing and content is learn AI drive me crazy. 1) you’re right, it’s not hard. 2) they’d all be much much better served investing that time in taking a class on narrative or fiction writing or screenwriting, and learning about scene, plot, stakes, conflict, and character development 3) it’s an actively nefarious argument that furthers the goal of job replacement. The greatest limitation on the current models is that they’ve gorged themselves on all the free information the internet has to offer, and to improve they need to learn the things that live in people’s heads. The more of your work you do in them, the more you train them on how you make decisions and do what you do.
2) Ugh yeah. I've been looking for advanced marketing writing courses to take to upskill further, actually, that don't have any modules about "how to leverage AI" and can't find them - I think you're right that I should broaden my search to general creative writing and cross-apply.
1) I legit don't know why people pretend that "learning to use AI tools" (especially LLMs!!) is something we need to invest serious time in or be left behind. Don't we all just know already? Isn't it already ubiquitous? Isn't it so simple an 8 yo could learn to vibe code or use a great deal of the capabilities of GPT in a few afternoons? Is it 2022 again? What IS this "advice"?
Oh yeah I categorically do *not* recommend marketing writing courses. I think you’re better off pursuing writing as a craft and then thinking of marketing as an application. You’re better off pursuing them as two separate tracks of knowledge and integrating them yourself.
NOTHING made me realize the value of great copy like the recent slew of absolutely horrific superbowl commercials...they were markedly worse and it was not hard to tell who made their teams use AI to generate ideas and who hired writers. I'm so glad you guys are in demand!
This is so well articulated and thought-provoking. Especially "I think we tend to overestimate how much of the humans experience is intelligence and underestimate how much is consciousness (i.e., bodily experience first)".
"He’s probably right on certain fronts, like that the average shittalker who’s still trotting out claims of chatbots 'hallucinating' has an outdated understanding of AI capabilities."
Wait, I have to challenge this! I make agentic AI as part of my job (I'm a UX Designer) and this is still the worst part of AI (and my company pays for advanced models). We use it as a style guide helper, and if something is not explicitly referenced in its source material, it will make it up! It also brings an absurd amount of "confidence" to its language, so when it makes something up, you just do not know based on the output.
Yes! A few months ago I left my job working as a PM on an AI assistant for data analysis, and one of our biggest frustrations was this habit of making things up… I was always like, “Why can’t it just tell us that it doesn’t know rather than spit out something patently false??” But thinking about it now, I guess as a computer, it can’t really understand the difference between “knowing” and “not knowing” - perhaps to it, it’s all just looking at the available data and making the most probable inference. Sometimes the most probable inference makes sense to a human and sometimes it doesn’t, but I guess maybe an AI wouldn’t be able to predict that in advance?
On the "feels like productivity" point, METR performed a study (almost a year ago, to be sure, so things may have changed) that found that experienced software developers who used AI in their workflows a) reported *feeling* that they were working faster/more productively and b) were objectively measured to be working *more slowly*, partly due to how much re-prompting and context-giving they had to do to get usable results: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
I'm interested to see how this evolves with newer models, and similar studies with other professions.
For what it’s worth, I do think this has changed with the newer models, as you mention.
I’m a software engineer, and starting with the models released late last year, it now feels like a totally different thing. I used to have to spend a long time writing a detailed, multi-paragraph prompt with links and examples, and then there’d still be lots of back and forth. Now I can write a few sentences and go back and forth once or twice.
Literally no one on my team writes their own code anymore, which has started to make me feel sad. :( We used to have personalities in the code, little snippets of our teammates’ thinking. Now it’s all the same generic yet clear robot-code.
There's a great bit from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs that your comment about missing the personality that you used to see in human-written code reminded me of:
We want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Yes! That is so well put. My parents were both writers, and I used to tell people that writing code wasn’t that different than writing anything else. Yes, you need it to function, but one of your main goals is to convey your point as clearly and as concisely as possible to your audience, which in this case is your current and future teammates who will be reading and working with that code.
I love this! I've been hoping you'd write about AI! I think something these folks like Shumer misunderstand is that things done on a computer—like writing, like analyzing—are only done after a lot of time off the computer. You describe your job as a computer job, but you write so much about living in the real world— being a mother, a reader, a friend. Is it really a computer job if it requires context, so much living in the world? I joke a lot about my "email job" too but it requires real relationships, that I leave and live and then return to reply. I think even those of us who aren't AI fangirls underestimate the value of our humanity...if that's not too dramatic!
I’m so glad you wrote this! I’ve been thinking about this dumb article/texting about it in my group chats all weekend. I work in marketing and the push to use AI for absolutely everything is relentless. It also feels like it’s becoming unavoidable - the prevalence of AI has changed everyone’s perceptions of how long thoughtful/creative work *should* take, which means workloads/timelines/manager expectations shift accordingly and you are constantly struggling to not be behind.
On the reference “how to tell if something was written by an LLM,” I was talking with a coworker about this recently and it seems like corporate executives are actually starting to prefer work that’s visibly AI, and to ask for revisions when it’s not - I think their brains are genuinely being conditioned to think AI = good/smart. (If you submit work that’s very clearly AI generated from the start, there’s much less feedback.) 🫠
I also had the disconcerting thought recently that when you submit a strategy doc that’s mostly AI-generated, your manager is almost certainly just uploading it to AI to summarize it and tell him what to think about it rather than reading it himself - so we’re really just in a loop of AI-produced work and AI-produced feedback. I have nothing smart to say about this phenomenon other than that it feels foreboding!
I hadn’t heard that term but it’s so true! Like the pinnacle of human development to this point has been so that we can…make robots talk to other robots? Cool cool cool.
i'm working with a career coach and while she didn't recommend having AI do my CV, she did recommend sending the job posting and my CV to ChatGPT and asking it if it thought the CV matched the job ... because probably the hiring companies are using some AI-powered tool to screen. ugh
Pro-AI-speak conditioning is sending me 😭 I was emailing with my financial advisor this week about my decision to switch banks, which prompted an unabashedly AI reply: “My goal is to ensure you feel fully informed and supported—whatever you decide.” Obv lit me up (this is where my banking fees are going?) - to think that banks might be incentivized to appear AI-driven to gain trust in the investment sphere had not even crossed my mind. Depressing..
GAH same but that makes perfect sense that they’d be trying to emulate (and also, the response very well may have been AI-aided!). Going to start looking out for this now…
I’ve been working in and with AI as a software dev since before chatgpt was released in 2022. It frustrates me to no end that LLMs get conflated with AI as a whole. I think the piece you read is one of many from figureheads who fail to communicate the distinction between AI / machine learning as a category and LLMs in the form of chatbots as the general public knows them (quite possibly because they don’t understand the distinction themselves. But this stuff is getting built out because engineers do understand it). That would be like thinking that browsers WERE the internet back at the dawn of search engines. LLMs combined with other tools become more than just fast writing machines, and how those agents will shape the future is generally quite hazy, that it’s that difficulty/impossibility that likely is what makes the postulating feel empty, aside from it being postulation/propaganda/marketing written to sensationalize and reach into the pockets of men who want to feel smart/powerful. Where it is possible to foresee certain futures with AI, it’s usually quite complex and industry specific. The dawn of the internet had people saying “this is the end of western civilization as we know it,” because they knew it was going to change the world, but they didn’t know exactly how. In 1995-97 when middle class homes started to buy a family computer, none of us were foreseeing malls failing bc of online shopping. Instead of taking cash and checks to the bank, we scan a check with our phones. I could go on forever with this list. The shape of the physical world - how we socialize, where our eyes rest “8 hours” of the day, how much exposure to worlds outside our own we could get - all that changed so much because of the internet, and the same will be true due to this tech, which is why the hype. It’s not LLMs that will produce the biggest evolutions to the texture of our lives. It’s LLM technology combined with other types of machine learning, often referred to as AI orchestration, or agents. Personally I’d place my bets on a future where all these new technologies still require quite a bit of human handholding. I think the devastation to work is overstated and the reshaping of work isn’t understood or knowable yet, so it’s either dismissed, sensationalized or capitalized on. Anyways sorry for the longest comment ever. I admire your brain and the way you’re approaching this with curiosity/not claiming to have the answers. But I fear a slice of your readers may find fodder for a predisposition towards AI resentment/dismissal that’s prevalent in creative spaces right now (understandably). But that would be unfortunately Boomer of us to take the words of obnoxious ego tripping CEOs and allow that to shutter curiosity around a new technology, or to take for granted the opportunity to be at the forefront in shaping industries as they shift.
When tech guys try to tell us what life is like!! Perfectly phrased. Feels like we are living in a world populated by very loud people who keep saying “Look, the reality is…” And you know what, it is so, so annoying when people say “Look, the reality is…”
yadda yadda yadda tech hype yadda yadda like there's never been a tech hype cycle before.
that's my reaction to the x post, not you :) i think you are spot on.
feckin tech bros thinking they can create intelligent life. the HUBRIS
i predict AI will become standard for some formulaic, rote things, which is fine though i'd be more excited about it if the result was more leisure time for the people who were doing those things rather than more expectations of ~productivity. but it's not going to put all of us out of a job. even software engineering is more creative and requires more abstract thinking than most people outside of the industry realize. the biggest marketing buzzword of, i'd say, the whole 21st century thus far is "authenticity." people like a real, human touch. AI can't do that.
anyway technological revolutions tend to lead to more jobs, not fewer. the tractor put a solid 25% of the population out of a job, now THAT'S upheaval.* but society is fine (well, maybe).
*i do believe there's some basis for this number but i'm not an expert and can't quote a source, anyway the tractor was a big deal
"Imagery, memory and experience" being the basis for human expression versus the nothingness of concept-heavy LLM writing is a great way to distinguish between the two, I love that! I'm yet to read the article because a few years ago I published a novel about everyone losing their jobs to AI, and what this would mean for future generations, and because I wasn't an expert but just a writer it was totally ignored 🤣- fair enough, but then as you say hete, who are the people who *get* the platform to talk about it, and what are they really saying, and for whose benefit? Anyway, a fascinating piece and I will stand down from my tiny soapbox - thank you!
I feel like I could make fun of “Something Big is Happening” forever. Sure, the tasteless loser who would choose that grotesquely basic header image written in a fake handwriting font that looks like the text generated by a digital document signature software WOULD believe machines can develop taste.
As a teacher I was most offended by “knowledge is basically free now, for only $20 a month” line about an “infinitely patient” tutor who can “explain at any level” - one of many fantasies in this piece and based in a belief that teaching is merely “explaining.” Also very rich to think you will somehow distinguish yourself professionally in a positive way by using AI tools because “no one is doing this” when in fact AI tools are ubiquitously available because they have been forcefully embedded with no opt-out in almost every part of our digital landscape. Even the examples he mentioned about law fail to mention that lawyers are routinely being sanctioned for citing case law that doesn’t exist because they or their staff used AI to write a brief. 404 media has good journalistic coverage of these incidents and other impacts of AI on workplaces, like “workslop” submitted by employees using AI having the effect of creating more work for others on their team, who have to try to parse and clean up the AI generated mess.
Like you mentioned, considering the politics of AI boosters is important. They almost never acknowledge the intellectual theft at mind boggling scale or the low wage training labor in places like Kenya that these models were built on. They fail utterly to consider the ethical, emotional, and material realms of being human. People who believe human labor will shortly be rendered useless by AI are usually not doing much of the labor that sustains their lives themselves.
On robots doing physical labor - I recommend the 2008 film “Sleep Dealer” - very prescient sci-fi that also has a lot to say about immigration.
I'm a software engineer, and the last few months have been pretty miserable. It's not that AI can now do my entire job and I'm sitting around doing nothing, but there's been a significant shift in the expectations of my role that has sucked the fun, creativity, and satisfaction out of solving complex problems or building something. The people going off on twitter always have an agenda, they’re rarely the ones in the weeds working in extremely complex codebases or connected to the problems that often arise when you try to ship code that hasn’t been thoughtfully considered. To act like AI tools aren’t still making basic mistakes and don’t need to be guided and instructed makes me feel like i’m being gaslit!!
Of course there are aspects of coding that are formulaic, and AI tools can be given more and more context and clearer guidelines for what’s good/what’s bad. Humans often make mistakes too. But the people controlling where things are headed are the “progress at any and all cost” kind of dudes, with 0 consideration for the real costs this technology will have on people and society (not to mention $$$) and it feels like we’re all at the mercy of their choices.
So interesting. I am in a programming-heavy area but not a software engineer and the pressure in the past few months to churn things out with minimal checks and thought is real. That said I am worried for what it will mean for my role in future
A lot of my work is editorial for brands — writing, videos, podcasts — and a lot of my clients are VCs. For a while it seemed like my job would be the first to be replaced by AI. A few years in, and I’ve noticed two things: my skills have never been more in demand or more expensive in the most AI-cozy companies, and the people who have the most to gain from people using AI — the people investing in the models — are the first to dismiss any final product that’s too clearly been made with AI as slop. They don’t mind if an unformed idea or outline has been clearly run through AI, but there’s a real aversion to any final product that looks too AI-made or polished. Even the people betting on this technology haven’t squared the paradox of what it’s doing to our sense of value: the more AI produces, the more the perceived value of anything made by AI plummets.
On a philosophical level, I think AI may prompt the end of rationalism. I think we tend to overestimate how much of the humans experience is intelligence and underestimate how much is consciousness (i.e., bodily experience first). But intelligence — whether human or machine — is just a random content generator. Intelligence decoupled from an actual experience of being a body and person in the world is fine, kind of useful, but not a replacement for people. It’s dense, but I highly recommend Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty! Read it this fall and it all felt more relevant than ever.
Final note: since understanding what’s happening in tech is an unfortunate side effect of my work, I’d recommend reading Benedict Evans and ignoring pretty much everything on X! He’s a great writer and clear thinker who’s very even-keeled — I feel like thanks to him, I have an actual framework to understand what’s happening as it does.
same experience here. They've been telling me for 3 years that my role as a copywriter will go away, ahem, tomorrow. And yet, I'm paid more today, sought-after more, and turn away job requests monthly because I don't have the capacity. The response? "It's so hard to find good writers! Let us know if your schedule changes at any time."
And yeah, we're all using the latest versions of ChatGPT on the *paid* plan and yeah, it still sucks at writing, even writing for sales and marketing purposes. It's empty, same-same, and customers don't like it. The only CEOs outsourcing marketing creative completely to AI (like firing staff and replacing them with machines) are those who have never cared about quality or understood what it looks like and why it matters to their bottom line, the cost-cutting-at-all-costs sort.
Will this change? Maybe! But I don't think my saving grace will learn how to use a tool that everyone in my field already knows how to use extensively (because it's pretty fucking simple, ha).
Completely agree with everything you just said. I think it’s because no matter how good AI gets or will get, it’s still probabilistic (i.e., better AI just means better averages) and great writing is deterministic. It’s highly specific.
And all of the sycophants saying the most important thing to do in writing and content is learn AI drive me crazy. 1) you’re right, it’s not hard. 2) they’d all be much much better served investing that time in taking a class on narrative or fiction writing or screenwriting, and learning about scene, plot, stakes, conflict, and character development 3) it’s an actively nefarious argument that furthers the goal of job replacement. The greatest limitation on the current models is that they’ve gorged themselves on all the free information the internet has to offer, and to improve they need to learn the things that live in people’s heads. The more of your work you do in them, the more you train them on how you make decisions and do what you do.
2) Ugh yeah. I've been looking for advanced marketing writing courses to take to upskill further, actually, that don't have any modules about "how to leverage AI" and can't find them - I think you're right that I should broaden my search to general creative writing and cross-apply.
1) I legit don't know why people pretend that "learning to use AI tools" (especially LLMs!!) is something we need to invest serious time in or be left behind. Don't we all just know already? Isn't it already ubiquitous? Isn't it so simple an 8 yo could learn to vibe code or use a great deal of the capabilities of GPT in a few afternoons? Is it 2022 again? What IS this "advice"?
Oh yeah I categorically do *not* recommend marketing writing courses. I think you’re better off pursuing writing as a craft and then thinking of marketing as an application. You’re better off pursuing them as two separate tracks of knowledge and integrating them yourself.
Hey, this is a really helpful and interesting perspective! Thank you.
NOTHING made me realize the value of great copy like the recent slew of absolutely horrific superbowl commercials...they were markedly worse and it was not hard to tell who made their teams use AI to generate ideas and who hired writers. I'm so glad you guys are in demand!
This is so well articulated and thought-provoking. Especially "I think we tend to overestimate how much of the humans experience is intelligence and underestimate how much is consciousness (i.e., bodily experience first)".
"He’s probably right on certain fronts, like that the average shittalker who’s still trotting out claims of chatbots 'hallucinating' has an outdated understanding of AI capabilities."
Wait, I have to challenge this! I make agentic AI as part of my job (I'm a UX Designer) and this is still the worst part of AI (and my company pays for advanced models). We use it as a style guide helper, and if something is not explicitly referenced in its source material, it will make it up! It also brings an absurd amount of "confidence" to its language, so when it makes something up, you just do not know based on the output.
Freddie DeBoer's post on this 100 percent tracks with my experience: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/llm-hallucinations-are-still-fucking
Yes! A few months ago I left my job working as a PM on an AI assistant for data analysis, and one of our biggest frustrations was this habit of making things up… I was always like, “Why can’t it just tell us that it doesn’t know rather than spit out something patently false??” But thinking about it now, I guess as a computer, it can’t really understand the difference between “knowing” and “not knowing” - perhaps to it, it’s all just looking at the available data and making the most probable inference. Sometimes the most probable inference makes sense to a human and sometimes it doesn’t, but I guess maybe an AI wouldn’t be able to predict that in advance?
omg agree I felt like I was being gaslit by his claim that it never makes stuff up anymore
On the "feels like productivity" point, METR performed a study (almost a year ago, to be sure, so things may have changed) that found that experienced software developers who used AI in their workflows a) reported *feeling* that they were working faster/more productively and b) were objectively measured to be working *more slowly*, partly due to how much re-prompting and context-giving they had to do to get usable results: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
I'm interested to see how this evolves with newer models, and similar studies with other professions.
For what it’s worth, I do think this has changed with the newer models, as you mention.
I’m a software engineer, and starting with the models released late last year, it now feels like a totally different thing. I used to have to spend a long time writing a detailed, multi-paragraph prompt with links and examples, and then there’d still be lots of back and forth. Now I can write a few sentences and go back and forth once or twice.
Literally no one on my team writes their own code anymore, which has started to make me feel sad. :( We used to have personalities in the code, little snippets of our teammates’ thinking. Now it’s all the same generic yet clear robot-code.
There's a great bit from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs that your comment about missing the personality that you used to see in human-written code reminded me of:
We want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Yes! That is so well put. My parents were both writers, and I used to tell people that writing code wasn’t that different than writing anything else. Yes, you need it to function, but one of your main goals is to convey your point as clearly and as concisely as possible to your audience, which in this case is your current and future teammates who will be reading and working with that code.
I love this! I've been hoping you'd write about AI! I think something these folks like Shumer misunderstand is that things done on a computer—like writing, like analyzing—are only done after a lot of time off the computer. You describe your job as a computer job, but you write so much about living in the real world— being a mother, a reader, a friend. Is it really a computer job if it requires context, so much living in the world? I joke a lot about my "email job" too but it requires real relationships, that I leave and live and then return to reply. I think even those of us who aren't AI fangirls underestimate the value of our humanity...if that's not too dramatic!
I’m so glad you wrote this! I’ve been thinking about this dumb article/texting about it in my group chats all weekend. I work in marketing and the push to use AI for absolutely everything is relentless. It also feels like it’s becoming unavoidable - the prevalence of AI has changed everyone’s perceptions of how long thoughtful/creative work *should* take, which means workloads/timelines/manager expectations shift accordingly and you are constantly struggling to not be behind.
On the reference “how to tell if something was written by an LLM,” I was talking with a coworker about this recently and it seems like corporate executives are actually starting to prefer work that’s visibly AI, and to ask for revisions when it’s not - I think their brains are genuinely being conditioned to think AI = good/smart. (If you submit work that’s very clearly AI generated from the start, there’s much less feedback.) 🫠
I also had the disconcerting thought recently that when you submit a strategy doc that’s mostly AI-generated, your manager is almost certainly just uploading it to AI to summarize it and tell him what to think about it rather than reading it himself - so we’re really just in a loop of AI-produced work and AI-produced feedback. I have nothing smart to say about this phenomenon other than that it feels foreboding!
yes! this is like "dead internet" theory...spooky.
I hadn’t heard that term but it’s so true! Like the pinnacle of human development to this point has been so that we can…make robots talk to other robots? Cool cool cool.
i'm working with a career coach and while she didn't recommend having AI do my CV, she did recommend sending the job posting and my CV to ChatGPT and asking it if it thought the CV matched the job ... because probably the hiring companies are using some AI-powered tool to screen. ugh
Pro-AI-speak conditioning is sending me 😭 I was emailing with my financial advisor this week about my decision to switch banks, which prompted an unabashedly AI reply: “My goal is to ensure you feel fully informed and supported—whatever you decide.” Obv lit me up (this is where my banking fees are going?) - to think that banks might be incentivized to appear AI-driven to gain trust in the investment sphere had not even crossed my mind. Depressing..
GAH same but that makes perfect sense that they’d be trying to emulate (and also, the response very well may have been AI-aided!). Going to start looking out for this now…
"something small is happening" >> https://x.com/johnpalmer/status/2021966462198460849?s=46
omgggg unreal
I’ve been working in and with AI as a software dev since before chatgpt was released in 2022. It frustrates me to no end that LLMs get conflated with AI as a whole. I think the piece you read is one of many from figureheads who fail to communicate the distinction between AI / machine learning as a category and LLMs in the form of chatbots as the general public knows them (quite possibly because they don’t understand the distinction themselves. But this stuff is getting built out because engineers do understand it). That would be like thinking that browsers WERE the internet back at the dawn of search engines. LLMs combined with other tools become more than just fast writing machines, and how those agents will shape the future is generally quite hazy, that it’s that difficulty/impossibility that likely is what makes the postulating feel empty, aside from it being postulation/propaganda/marketing written to sensationalize and reach into the pockets of men who want to feel smart/powerful. Where it is possible to foresee certain futures with AI, it’s usually quite complex and industry specific. The dawn of the internet had people saying “this is the end of western civilization as we know it,” because they knew it was going to change the world, but they didn’t know exactly how. In 1995-97 when middle class homes started to buy a family computer, none of us were foreseeing malls failing bc of online shopping. Instead of taking cash and checks to the bank, we scan a check with our phones. I could go on forever with this list. The shape of the physical world - how we socialize, where our eyes rest “8 hours” of the day, how much exposure to worlds outside our own we could get - all that changed so much because of the internet, and the same will be true due to this tech, which is why the hype. It’s not LLMs that will produce the biggest evolutions to the texture of our lives. It’s LLM technology combined with other types of machine learning, often referred to as AI orchestration, or agents. Personally I’d place my bets on a future where all these new technologies still require quite a bit of human handholding. I think the devastation to work is overstated and the reshaping of work isn’t understood or knowable yet, so it’s either dismissed, sensationalized or capitalized on. Anyways sorry for the longest comment ever. I admire your brain and the way you’re approaching this with curiosity/not claiming to have the answers. But I fear a slice of your readers may find fodder for a predisposition towards AI resentment/dismissal that’s prevalent in creative spaces right now (understandably). But that would be unfortunately Boomer of us to take the words of obnoxious ego tripping CEOs and allow that to shutter curiosity around a new technology, or to take for granted the opportunity to be at the forefront in shaping industries as they shift.
When tech guys try to tell us what life is like!! Perfectly phrased. Feels like we are living in a world populated by very loud people who keep saying “Look, the reality is…” And you know what, it is so, so annoying when people say “Look, the reality is…”
The way I knew in my bones you were going to write about this AND it was exactly what I wanted to read. The voice of a generation!
yadda yadda yadda tech hype yadda yadda like there's never been a tech hype cycle before.
that's my reaction to the x post, not you :) i think you are spot on.
feckin tech bros thinking they can create intelligent life. the HUBRIS
i predict AI will become standard for some formulaic, rote things, which is fine though i'd be more excited about it if the result was more leisure time for the people who were doing those things rather than more expectations of ~productivity. but it's not going to put all of us out of a job. even software engineering is more creative and requires more abstract thinking than most people outside of the industry realize. the biggest marketing buzzword of, i'd say, the whole 21st century thus far is "authenticity." people like a real, human touch. AI can't do that.
anyway technological revolutions tend to lead to more jobs, not fewer. the tractor put a solid 25% of the population out of a job, now THAT'S upheaval.* but society is fine (well, maybe).
*i do believe there's some basis for this number but i'm not an expert and can't quote a source, anyway the tractor was a big deal
"Imagery, memory and experience" being the basis for human expression versus the nothingness of concept-heavy LLM writing is a great way to distinguish between the two, I love that! I'm yet to read the article because a few years ago I published a novel about everyone losing their jobs to AI, and what this would mean for future generations, and because I wasn't an expert but just a writer it was totally ignored 🤣- fair enough, but then as you say hete, who are the people who *get* the platform to talk about it, and what are they really saying, and for whose benefit? Anyway, a fascinating piece and I will stand down from my tiny soapbox - thank you!
Hayley! You are so smart. 🫶🏻
Amen Amen and Amen!
yay haley ☀️💙