Forget the quick engineer. The real job in the AI economy is that of an editor: a human being who spends hours polishing something that so-called “artificial intelligence” spit out in milliseconds so that it is actually usable.
Members of the Writers Guild of America were rightly concerned that Hollywood studios would want to replace human screenwriters with AI and then pay editors a pittance to turn AI-generated scripts into truly workable shooting scripts.
That’s already happening with other types of writing. Thomas Germain for the BBC:
Writer Benjamin Miller (not his real name) was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, publishing blog posts and articles to promote a technology company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. . “It was a really interesting job,” Miller says, an opportunity to unleash his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of topics. But one day, Miller’s manager told him about a new project. “They wanted to use AI to reduce costs,” he says. …
A month later, the company introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager would insert an article title into an online form, an artificial intelligence model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would receive an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with his own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines and Miller would make a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adjust before receiving news of a second layer of automation. In the future, ChatGPT would write the articles entirely and most of their team was laid off. The few people left were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT’s lackluster text to make it look more human.
By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller’s team and he was left alone. “He was suddenly doing everyone’s job,” Miller says. Every day, he opened documents written by AI to correct the robot’s formula errors, generating work that he used to employ dozens of people.
These companies want quality content like what human writers and artists can create, without having to pay them what they deserve. AI still can’t create content that doesn’t need serious human editing.
Sometimes you can spend a lot of time analyzing a suggestion and the best you can come up with is something you have to hand over to a human writer or artist to shape into what you need.
AI is supposedly a great equalizer, putting small businesses on equal footing with large corporations. But large corporations have the budget to pay editors, while a small business owner might have to do that work alone.
I know a woman, call her “Taesha,” who runs a couple different businesses. You need images for both. I wanted to use a lot of my NightCafe credits, so I was happy to spend like 300 of my credits on a bunch of different preset and message combinations.
Taesha and I got several images that were almost, but not exactly, what she needed. We also got a lot more images where the AI completely ignored the words we had added to the message based on what we saw in previous results, to try to get it closer to what Taesha wanted. And we also got some images that made us say “What the hell!?”
Taesha chose one of the best images and hired a human artist to adapt it to what she needed. Meanwhile, Taesha earned some credits of her own from NightCafe and used them to generate images for his other business. And while he got a lot better at writing prompts and choosing presets, he still needed to hire a human artist to get an image that fit his branding kit.
The AI economy has also created jobs in detecting AI-created content. and adjust AI algorithms to create content that evades AI detection. After being fired from his job editing AI-generated text,
Miller found a new, if rather ironic, opportunity. She landed a job at Undetectable AI, a technology company that creates software to make AI writing harder to identify. In other words, Miller is helping a company that uses AI to do the work he was forced to do. after AI took your job first.
Then Miller landed on his feet. A bit. But not really.
