The pace at which AI has damagedcountlessindustries 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. (View Highlight)
“They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” the writer told the BBC, using the pseudonym Benjamin Miller. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
“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.” (View Highlight)
“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.” (View Highlight)
Miller was cornered into that position, but across the industry, being an AI fixer-upper has quickly become a dominant new form of grunt work. (View Highlight)
“We’re adding the human touch, but that often requires a deep, developmental edit on a piece of writing,” Catrina Cowart, a US-based copywriter who’s edited AI text, told the BBC. “It’s tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it.” (View Highlight)
Out of a job, the best work he could find was — in a grim twist — working with a firm that makes AI writing harder to detect. A sobering indictment of the state of affairs, to say the least. (View Highlight)
