Artifice

Have you heard about “work slop”? Work slop is AI-generated work product that looks really pretty and professional but is actually - wait for it - slop. LinkedIn is all abuzz about work slop. People are shocked - shocked! - that people who would use Gemini or ChatGPT to write their memos or their slide decks or their data tables would also not bother to check their work and to correct what doesn’t make sense. 

Not long ago, I was handed a pile of work slop. Someone asked me to edit a document and I realized just a few words into the first paragraph that I was reading something whose only human contribution was the initial AI prompt. I had to rewrite it completely. 

Part of me felt vindicated. AI thinks it can take my job, does it? Well until they come up with a generative AI application that can write like a human being who actually uses and understands the English (or any other) language, good luck to it. 

But I’m me, of course, so I immediately imagined a worst-case scenario. The WCS is my default setting. What if AI becomes so dominant that it no longer needs to try to mimic us, because we will be mimicking it? What if we all end up speaking and writing - and even thinking - in the language of AI-generated social media scripts and marketing collateral? 

*****

A few months ago, I read The Portrait of Dorian Gray for the first time. Dorian Gray was published in 1890, so we can’t say that preoccupation with the superficial and desire for an unnatural level of physical perfection are 21st century phenomena. Oscar Wilde recognized obsession with youth well over a hundred years ago. I wonder what he would have made of Kristi Noem or Martha Stewart or that crazy tech CEO dude who spends millions of dollars trying to stay young forever (unsuccessfully, I might add - he’s in his 40s, and he looks like he’s in his 40s - he could have achieved those results for free). 

I’m thinking about how AI would figure in a modern retelling of Dorian Gray. Maybe instead of a portrait, there’d be an AI double who would deteriorate with age while the real Dorian Gray built billion-dollar electricity-gobbling data centers and exploitative gig work platforms and sports betting empires and cryptocurrency exchanges. The forever-young Dorian Gray would have 1b followers on social media watching him hustle and grind and self-optimize, and wondering how he manages to never look older than 21. The AI Dorian Gray would look like Stephen Miller at age 80. Real Dorian would employ Blackwater mercenaries to guard the safe room where the holographic AI Dorian is projected on a wall, aging in real time. 

Look at me, out here writing fan fiction. 

*****

“Have you ever heard about the dot com bubble?” That was my 24-year-old son to me at dinner the other night. Yes, I had heard about it. I lived through it lol. My son believes that we’re sitting on top of an AI bubble, and he can’t wait for it to burst. He might be right. If enough people have to read and edit the kind of “writing” that I dealt with this week, and if enough people start to notice that their electricity and water bills are much higher than they should be, and if enough older people like me understand that AI is a big part of the reason why their new college graduates cannot find jobs, and if everyone finally realizes that the AI edgelords actually don’t have our best interests at heart, then the AI backlash could gain steam. 

I read somewhere that Microsoft “invested” in OpenAI by giving them “credits” for free use of Microsoft supercomputer labs. Microsoft then claimed those credit redemptions as “revenue.” If one company claiming an imaginary multi-billion dollar “investment” in another company and then calling that company’s use of its imaginary credits “revenue” isn’t the clearest ever example of fake accounting, then I don’t know anything about anything. And I don’t know anything about anything, really. The stock market and the futures markets and the currency markets have always been black boxes to me, completely incomprehensible. But I have a grasp of the basics, and one of the basics is that bubbles that burst are usually built on dodgy financial practices. 

*****

It’s all very grim, but despite my initial WCS projection, I am uncharacteristically optimistic, at least about this one thing. I think that people are going to push back, and we’re not going to let AI take over and do all of our thinking and creating for us. Other than a certain very creepy college professor, I don’t know anyone who actually wants to watch Tilly Norwood on screen.