AI sounds like your boss
The discourse around the Coming of AI has been inescapable on my internet for several months now, and probably yours too. I haven’t tried Chat GPT, or Bing, or any of the image generators yet, though not because I’m opposed to them in some meaningful way. I’m just…not sure what I would do with them, at a time when I’m trying to remember how it feels to do the things I actually want to do. My imagination has only recently returned, and directing it toward incorporating AI into my life feels like a boring way to use it. I guess my preferred waste of time and brain space is to read other people’s thoughts about AI, not to try out AI for myself.
Past experience suggests, however, that the more I resist or ignore a technological development, the more likely it is to become central to white-collar, middle-class life within the next five years. I had to be forced to carry around a cell phone beginning in my later years of high school, and I didn’t understand how or why to send a text message for several years after that. The first time I interacted with an iPhone, c.2007, I genuinely believed it would be the last time I interacted with an iPhone. I earnestly wondered what we would do with our Facebook accounts after we graduated from college. (The answer turned out to be, wait ten years and then delete them. Maybe I’m so far ahead of the curve I loop back around to being behind.)
Predictably, then, I’ve been having trouble envisioning our AI future, and I also didn’t really care. It’ll come for me just like it does everyone else, however much time I do or don’t spend thinking about it. In the meantime, I’ll happily live in the pre-AI world for as long as I can get away with.
This week, though, an analysis finally broke through my AI apathy, and I felt like I could see the near future clicking into place. It isn’t catastrophic, but it is annoying, and it threatens to steamroll over the real potential these tools have to improve people’s, or at least office workers’, jobs and lives. “The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived,” writes John Herrman:
In Gmail, there are tools that will attempt to compose entire emails or edit them for tone as well as tools for ingesting and summarizing long threads. In Docs, there are tools for generating text from simple prompts or other content. A lengthy email discussion is turned into a “brief” and then a slide deck, which is then illustrated with generated imagery.
I watched the embedded marketing video from Google (kill me), and yes, there are details that jumped out at me as extremely useful and cool, particularly using AI to take notes during a meeting and synthesize them for later reference. (Women of the office world, be free!) That application felt like seeing Google Maps on a smartphone for the first time and realizing, oh, that’s what this is for. Of course, smartphones quickly became “for” much more than helping us find our way around the real world, and many if not most of those uses disconnected us from that world and the people in it. AI, with its ability to effortlessly generate endless streams of what Molly Young memorably called “garbage language,” will certainly do the same. As Herrman writes:
For people whose job involves generating lots of content, or perhaps for whom the creation of lots of content is a convincing performance of work, this has obvious possible uses — if, of course, it’s any good at what it does.
On the other hand, for those who might interact with people who have these jobs — that is, those who can expect to be on the receiving end of this plentiful new content — these features read a bit differently. Are you excited for your co-workers to become way more verbose, turning every tapped-out “Sounds good” into a three-paragraph letter? Are you glad that the sort of semi-customized mass emails you’re used to getting from major brands with marketing departments (or from spammers and phishers) are now within reach for every entity with a Google account? Are you looking forward to wondering if that lovely condolence letter from a long-lost friend was entirely generated by software or if he just smashed the “More Heartfelt” button before sending it?
I don’t think AI will replace office workers, at least not right away. More insidious is the way we’re about to double down on orienting white-collar, marginally creative jobs around what AI is best at: A meaningless verboseness that approximates but doesn’t replicate human communication, because there is nothing but a void on the other side. Ironically, it turns out the managerial class had already been training themselves to speak like AIs, before most people knew what an AI sounded like. It’s the dark art of speaking without saying anything, of making subordinates (and sometimes bosses, when “managing up”) feel heard while negating the need for or the possibility of listening. Transactional communication between manager and employee, and also between corporation and consumer, has already been dehumanized to such a degree that we’ll barely notice when it no longer involves any humans at all.
“The obsolescence of a particular human task is, like, the LEAST interesting thing about these processes, and cackling about the end of task X or job Y is like staring at a spot on the carpet while they rebuild the whole house around you,” Robin Sloan wrote last December, in an essay I wished I could have newslettered at the time. The question we should be asking is, “How will the world now be reshaped to fit [AI’s] needs?…Think of cars, and how dutifully humans have engineered a world just for them, to our own great detriment. What will be the equivalent, for AI, of the gas station, the six-lane highway, the parking lot?”
AI-generated slide decks almost certainly won’t be consequential as the six-lane highway, but they may be the first step towards whatever the equivalent will be. The people in power will love this version of AI, because it sounds like them. They will be able to ventriloquize themselves with none of the cognitive effort or emotional repression previously required to speak like a machine, once the machine is doing the speaking. They’ll be able to force us to adopt it too, whether as a top-down mandate or as the path of least resistance. If your bosses/the economy stop rewarding you for writing or creating or drawing and start rewarding you for “pattern matching,” why not outsource the labor to the best pattern matcher of all time? A lot more people are going to end up with bullshit jobs, or they’re going to realize they had bullshit jobs all along.
As usual, however, this dystopian future could become a lot more utopian with just a slight tweak to our frame of reference. If AI is so great at slide decks and corporate emails, it’s only because those pieces of content were already as empty as they could get without becoming fully automated. Instead of seeing AI as a great tool for creating even more slide decks and corporate emails, this should be our chance to ask why we need any slide decks and corporate emails. The coming deluge of garbage language should be an invitation to question, reject, or ignore all of it, whether it was written by a human or a machine. We can use AI to more easily conform to the boxes we’ve stuffed ourselves and each other inside, or we can use AI to realize those boxes have been constricting and distorting our potential this whole time. I know which future I want, and I know which future we’re likely to get. AI can’t imagine anything better, because it can’t imagine anything. But we can.