Lance Parkin

AI will basically refashion the economy so it's the Springfield Nuclear Plant. Except, of course, producing more greenhouse gas.

Instead of being seen as important work that, by definition, only a human can do, 'AI factchecking' jobs will be seen as rubbish piecework, and kept as far out of sight as possible. Look at the shiny robot, not the two kids who follow it around and keep it upright.

Here's what will happen, spoilers for 2026-36.

Blue collar jobs will all still be there, all necessary, and will remain low-paid, insecure. We learned nothing from Covid about 'essential workers'.

White collar work will become AI factchecking, and employers will try to skimp on that.

Ask why 'so we can go down to one day a week, working from home?' is ridiculous, you get to two possible answers:

1. This is rich people trying to cut costs, i.e.: workers, to amass even greater wealth.

2. This is conmen using a Furby to con rich people that (1)'s possible.

(Spoiler: it's (2)).

We can have the same amount of economic productivity for 20% of the human labour. That's the claim. So we can have the same standard of living, working one day a week. Right?

D-Day as envisioned by the AI slop factory. Like the second world war was fighting fuckin' Cthulhu or something.

It was a really nasty accident.

Call the AI hucksters' bluff on this. If AI can do 80% of the work of a human, great ... the humans can get paid the same for doing a fifth of the work.

There is absolutely no reason why basically anyone with a human brain couldn't earn a living wage working an hour or two a day, from home or in a coffee shop, in a secure and unionised job, checking the AI's work product.

The checkers will be needed. We don't have to race to the bottom.

AI means that a lot of Graeber's 'bullshit jobs' will be automated BUT humans will still be needed for quality control.

There is absolutely no reason why the quality controllers couldn't have awesome working conditions.

Hear me out.

Which is fine. Microscopes didn't replace scientists, y'know?

Let's focus on the fact that a lot of people will soon be employed sweeping out AI slop. And that you're going to need people to facepalm and go 'Jesus Christ, there was a President Cleveland, recalculate' and that no one is trained.

Here's the thing, here's the only thing that we need to understand about 'AI'. It's not 'replacing' humans. It's creating a whole new set of tasks *for* humans.

Can you imagine how long a human researcher would take to answer the question 'where is President Cleveland buried?', but Bing managed to come up with an answer in *microseconds*.

A cretinously wrong answer. But *microseconds*. THE RESEARCH GAME HAS CHANGED FOREVER.

The point wasn't for them to understand their own weird burbling, it was for you to burn all your energy in a futile attempt to comply with their weird burbling.

Shave off your sideburns. No, those weren't sideburns. Keep shaving.

It's presented as 'can a computer compose a jaunty tune?', but what actually happened is the computer was played a tune and then asked to play it back with a little more jauntiness.

When the original tune was great, but not necessarily meant to be jaunty.

It's NOT THE SAME TASK.

Before we get into the philosophy, whether, y'know, Ursula K Le Guin brought more to the table than content generation, take a step back and this 'test' isn't two minds doing the same thing. It's more like a violinist playing a tune they composed and a computer identifying the notes.

Also worth noting that presumably the human who set Slopotron this very narrow task sifted the results, identifying the best ones to trick the people taking the test.

There is small print, but it's presented as, I dunno, the rematch of Kasparov v Deep Blue. It's just not that.

‘Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s changed? The first people say that that isn’t the point. They aren’t quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn’t it.’

The technology is amazing. It's not capable of 'reading comprehension' in the way the smallest literate child is, but it's some clever pattern recognition. I'm sure there are some uses for this, which users might find for themselves. Forcefeeding slop as '>human writing' isn't one of them, though.

'It's getting better' is just massively disingenuous, in this context.

It was asked to paraphrase an existing sentence for clarity, it basically just echoes the meaning and structure, but scrubs out some of the poetry to make it more generic.

OK. So it's getting better at ... that? Well done, all

"We asked A.I. to choose an existing piece of strong writing and then craft its own version using its own voice."

So, it's not 'writing', or 'crafting', it's paraphrasing. And it's SOOOOO easy to spot which one's the original and which one's the knock off.

If you throw the test and drink the slop, it says 'we're not saying slopotron is better at writing than humans, but it shows it's better at writing things with broad appeal than humans'.

When I thwarted the aim of this test, I wasn't congratulated, there's no humility, it's just 'well, you're lucky, and human writers are flawed'.

Cormac McCarthy didn't avoid punctuation because he didn't have a premium subscription to Grammarly. You shameless, huckster noblords.

But you can see how insane this is. They set a test where they've very clearly taken a paragraph of written text and prompted a program to tidy it up for clarity or something. It's not taken the photo, it's airbrushed an existing photo. But ... crudely.

An actual analysis would be 'Wow! 5 out of 5. Guess there are ways to spot when a computer generated some text, even when we tilt the playing field.'

I take a test, easily spot the slop. The analysis tells me I'm a lucky guesser, Cormac McCarthy's a clunky writer, and AI's getting better.

HUMANS PASSED YOUR RIGGED TEST, AT BOTH ENDS, YOU'RE NOT A BETTER WRITER THAN URSULA K LE GUIN, YOU'VE FAILED, SLOPOTRON.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

That's it, that's the whole anecdote. I admit I admire the efficient worldbuilding in that works order.

Aeons ago, in a different millennium, on a different continent, I worked in the logistics department of a hospital and I was the middleman between the works team and the doctor who wrote the works order 'unblock personal toilet of compacted faecal matter, retrieve my spectacles if possible'.

A lot of Tory voters currently don't want to vote Tory, so they're parking their votes on some wasteland nearby. That's it, that is, to the first approximation, all the Brexit Party is or will be. You think this sickly toad has 'appeal'? Then you're a fool who never saw a poll.

Oh, very good.