Gotta Get Out
Shit is wild. In 2023 Joanne McNeils Wrong Way came out and I got to read an advance copy. In it our protagonist drives “self-driving” cars. She is lifted into a part of the car, sees what happens inside and drives. The passengers have no clue.
Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.
I return to thinking about that part of the book over and over. It may not be the main focus of the novel. But next to questions about “good” jobs this is what stuck with me most. How we tend to enjoy something and not think about what the parts to it could be.
Cory Doctorow writes about people who ask about AI in works, as a way to make sure it is “good”. It gives me goosebumps.
Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.
and
My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done “with AI” were never before asked “Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?” It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. “Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro” is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.
What are we even doing? I have to remember to cool off. Go outside. Touch grass. Easier said then done. Tired after work. Where to go without spending more money? Need to make myself just sit in the park and read. Make some sort of art. Listen to some great music: