Impostor Syndrome

The pace at which AI has damaged countless industries is whiplash-inducing. And no one understands this better than a writer who in 2023 was excelling at his copywriting job with a team of writers 60 people strong — and by the next year found himself the last human standing, arm in arm with AI imitators he was expected to drag along and get up to speed.

“They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” the writer told the BBC, using the pseudonym Benjamin Miller.

At first, the new workflow was this: his manager would feed a headline into an AI model, and it would generate an outline that the team were expected to work with, with Miller doing the final edits.

But that was just the beginning. Months later, management decided to cut humans out of the loop almost completely. Going forward, the AI model would generate articles in their entirety. Shoddy automation was here, and as a consequence, most of the writers lost their jobs. Miller kept his — though his role was going to be a bit different than before.

Now, he was tasked with polishing up the AI’s lackluster prose, and, to quote the BBC, “make it sound more human.” If only there was a way of doing that with, uh, human writers.

Dehumanizing Drudgery

Soon, Miller was the only human employee left on the team. It was down to him, and him alone, to fix up all the AI-generated articles.

“All of a sudden I was just doing everyone’s job,” Miller told the BBC. “Mostly, it was just about cleaning things up and making the writing sound less awkward, cutting out weirdly formal or over-enthusiastic language.”

“It was more editing than I had to do with human writers, but it was always the exact same kinds of edits,” he added. “The real problem was it was just so repetitive and boring. It started to feel like I was the robot.”

And so Miller found himself in the unenviable position of legitimizing the intrusion of AI into his very own job by making the extremely fallible models appear more capable than they actually are. This hasn’t been a fate exclusive to writers; in the service industry, for example, an army of underpaid, outsourced workers secretly worked behind the scenes to power the “AI” drive-thrus at the fast food chain Checkers.

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I worked as a translator for many years. Gradually, computers took over and I moved on. I found it liberating to be replaced by machines. The other day I posted a song supposedly composed and played by AI. I think the song is pretty good and is a masterpiece of composition, employing almost every major lyrical and musical trope in its genre. It’s humorous, cleverly mocking, has many good lines—I think her name was Hailey. Where’d you run? The song was based on a Tik Tok clip with the pictured women making a reference to a sexual act. She was joking. The video was widely received with good humor. You can find more reactions at the link. As for the musicality of the tune, I play guitar but AI selected riffs ‘twice as better than I will’. Lots of people dump on music, especially country, because it’s just simple patterns. Steve Pinker has said as much. But AI is going to show Pinker that even his exalted thoughts and prose can be imitated. They too are just simple patterns, tropes. AI is revealing the core of Buddhism, itself the root of skepticism and stoicism, by forcing us see and feel the amalgam of experience and memory that is human ‘creativity’, its transience, emptiness and copyableness by a machine. ABN