Firm cuts prices by changing 60-strong writing staff with AI
A sizzling potato: CEOs, bosses, and the those that make the know-how like to guarantee those who synthetic intelligence is not going to exchange everybody’s jobs; it can merely increase them – working alongside people to make life simpler. But we preserve listening to tales just like the one a few author whose employer fired his 60-person staff and changed them with an AI.
A author utilizing the pseudonym Benjamin Miller informed the BBC that his firm needed to make use of AI to chop prices in early 2023. He led a staff of greater than 60 writers and editors who revealed weblog posts and articles to advertise a tech firm that packages and resells knowledge.
The brand new workflow concerned feeding headlines into an AI mannequin that will generate an overview based mostly on the title. The writing staff would then create articles based mostly on these concepts, fairly than developing with their very own, with Miller modifying the ultimate items.
Which may sound just like the definition of AI working alongside people, however issues inevitably modified.
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than bosses determined that ChatGPT ought to write the articles of their entirety, resulting in most of Miller’s staff being fired. Those that had been left had the duty of constructing the chatbot’s textual content sound extra human-like.
Ultimately, Miller was the one human worker left on the staff. The duty of constructing AI-generated content material sound prefer it got here from a human was all the way down to him alone.
“Abruptly I used to be simply doing everybody’s job,” he mentioned. “It was extra modifying than I needed to do with human writers, however it was at all times the very same sorts of edits. The actual downside was it was simply so repetitive and boring. It began to really feel like I used to be the robotic.”
A number of months later, the corporate determined that not even Miller was wanted. The ironic twist within the story is that the perfect work he might discover was at a tech agency known as Undetectable AI, which builds software program to make AI writing more durable to determine.
Miller’s ultimate touch upon the matter will probably resonated with those that consider in Useless Web concept. “I contributed to quite a lot of the rubbish that is filling the web and destroying it,” he mentioned. “No person was even studying these things by the point I left as a result of it is simply trash.”
Regardless of the hallucinations, questionable high quality, and public anger at its use, extra firms are utilizing generative AI to exchange people. Only a few positions are 100% protected, with everybody from software program engineers and IT technicians to name middle brokers and directors probably in danger. It is led to requires a common fundamental earnings to assist alleviate the affect on society as a complete.
