I have so many bad writing habits. I could’ve never been an author, i’m sure an editor would’ve strangled me by now.
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It’s probably not you, then, it’s that someone probably trained their LLMs on some classical rhetorical writing style at some point.
Honestly, most people do. That’s why editors exist, in fact. I don’t think anyone just spits out good writing the first time. Editors are the magic sauce that help a writer be a better writer.
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Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death because of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things well; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.
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That nails it.
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I wouldn’t be so confident about that.
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Maybe they should take lessons from Brazilian police…
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Why use ChatGPT to add a logo? That’s trivial to do even in MSPaint.
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Lazy and stupid.
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The manager wrote in their comment, “Auto rejection systems from HR make me angry.” They explained that while searching for a new employee, their HR department could not find a single qualified candidate in three months. As expected, the suspicious manager decided to investigate.
“I created myself a new email and sent them a modified version of my CV with a fake name to see what was going on with the process,” they wrote. “And guess what, I got auto-rejected. HR didn’t even look at my CV.”
When the manager reported the issue to upper management, “half of the HR department was fired in the following weeks.” A typographical error with significant consequences caused the entire problem.
The manager works in the tech industry and was trying to hire developers. However, HR had set up the system to search for developers with expertise in the wrong development software and one that no longer exists.
Welcome to the wonderful world of AI
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In my day, HR could fuck up staffing without AI. Or even using computers beyond E-Mail.
In early 2001 I applied for a job with the publishing arm of an industry association for engineers. They were about to tie onions to their belts launch a web portal a was the style at the time. They wanted someone with a background in civil engineering to take care of this section. Sort of mix of editor and content generator.
The first interview with two or three people working on the web portal and someone from HR went rather well. So they invited me back for a second round, this time with some higher-ups, including the head of HR who did most of the talking. This time, it didn’t go as well as before… weird, unconnected questions, but I did my best. Anyway, maybe 20 minutes in, we established that there had been a mix-up in HR and this time they were interviewing me for a completely different position altogether. Still connected to the web portal, though - but designing and running the server farm.
The head of HR didn’t strike me as the type of man who could handle an awkward situation with confidence (let alone a sense of humour) or frankly admit any mistakes on his department’s part.
The cherry on top turned out to be that the position I had applied for had been more or less filled already bar the signing of the contract.
Mind you, I’m not complaining. Quite probably a blessing in disguise. As I said, this was in early 2001. So they were a bit late to the party already. And shortly after, the web portal did what most of them did when the dot-com bubble imploded. So I didn’t have that on my CV, just a decent career in civil engineering.
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Now, with ai’s assistance, they can fuck up even more often and more profoundly.
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Wow. A rare example of a manager who’s trying to hire humans rather than replace them, is skeptical of AI technology, and actually holds people to account for stupid over-reliance on a flawed AI system. That’s not normally how these stories go.
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What this makes me wonder is wtf is their HR team doing if they’re not looking at any resumes?
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Lines.
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