But then how will people write 20 cover letters a day to keep up with the increasing rate of instant rejections?
Saw a really depressing ad at work the other day where Google was advertising their thing and it was some person asking their LLM to write a letter for their daughter to this athlete bragging about how she’ll break her record one day. They couch it in “here’s a draft” but it’s just so bleak. The idea that a child so excited about doing a sport and dreaming of going to the Olympics and getting a world record can’t just write a bit of a clumsy letter expressing themselves to their hero is just beyond depressing. Writing swill for automated systems that are going to reject you anyway is one thing, but the idea that they think that this is a legitimate use of these models just highlights how obnoxiously out of touch they are.
How do we learn and grow as people and find our own writing voices if we don’t write some of the most cringe shit imaginable when we’re young. I wrote a weird letter to Emma Watson in middle school, nobody ever read it, but it was a learning experience and made me actually have to think about my own feelings. These techbros have to have been grown in vats.
I’ve hesitated to ever write anything about it thinking it’d come across as too latest fad after the NFT boom.
One of the most unnerving things to me about “AI” in the common understanding is that its entire hype cycle and main use cases are all tacit admissions that all of the professional and academic uses of it are proof that their pre-“AI” standards were perfunctory hoop jumping bullshit to join the professional managerial class, and their “artistic” uses are almost entirely utilized by people with zero artistic sensibilities or weirdo porno sickos. All of it belies a deep cynicism about the status quo where what could have been heartfelt but clumsy writing by young students or the athlete in your example are being unknowingly robbed of their agency and the humanizing future of looking back on clunky immature writing as a personal marker of growth. They’re just hoops to jump through to get whatever degree or accolade you’re seeking, with whatever personal growth that those achievements originally meant stripped of anything other than “achieving them is good because it advances your career and earning potential.” Techbros’ most fawning and optimistic pitches of “AI” and “The Singularity” instead read to me as the grimmest and most alienating version of neoliberal “end of history” horseshit where even art and language themselves are reduced to SEO marketized min/maxxed rat races.
I hope this doesn’t sound too but I had to get that rant out
Maybe I’ll expand that into something
no I thought it was on point, just don’t use substack or wordpress if you start blogging we have better options now
