If you're worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future.

If you’re worried about how AI will affect your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse of the future.

Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. “It was really engaging work,” Miller says, a chance to flex his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller’s manager told him about a new project. “They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” he says. (Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement, and asked the BBC to withhold his and the company’s name.)

A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form, an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT’s subpar text to make it sound more human.

By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller’s team, and he was alone. “All of a sudden I was just doing everyone’s job,” Miller says. Every day, he’d open the AI-written documents to fix the robot’s formulaic mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people.

  • rottingleafEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    Well, while my views on economics are still libertarian, there’s one trait of very complex and interconnected systems, like market economies (as opposed to Soviet-style planned economy, say, which was still arcanely complex, but with fewer connections to track in analysis, even considering black markets, barter, unofficial negotiations etc), - it’s never clear how centralized it really is and it’s never clear what it’s going to become.

    It’s funny how dystopian things from all extremes of that “political compass” thing come into reality. Turns out you don’t need to pick one, it can suck all ways. Matches well what one would expect from learning about world history, of course.

    What I’m trying to say is that power is power, not matter what’s written in any laws. The only thing resembling a cure is keeping as much of it as possible distributed at all times. A few decades from now it may be found again, and then after some time forgotten again.

      • rottingleafEnglish
        1·
        13 days ago

        That’s my point.

        The popular idea that you can avoid giving power to the average person, giving it all to some bureaucracy, or big companies in some industry, or some institutions, and yelling “rule of law”, has come to its logical conclusion.

        Where bureaucrats become sort of a mafia\aristocracy layer, big companies become oligopolies entangled with everything wrong, and institutions sell their decisions rather cheap.