Monday, February 06, 2023

It's the Humans, Stupid (Not the Robots)

 I’m starting to work out why the arrival of robots that write like humans doesn’t bother me or make me anxious. In fact, it actually brings much more a sense of relief than fear or outrage.

It’s a simple thing, really. Ever since page rank (aka Google) took over control of what content rises to the top of our collective consciousness, it hasn’t been the idea of machines writing like humans that has been the problem — i’s the reality that too many humans are trying to write like machines.

You heard me. The problem with writing on the web is that people write to please the robots, and not the other way around. 

I know this because as a result my truest love — writing — was murdered in cold blood right before my eyes. And people like me were forced to contemplate a new world filled with pathetic jobs at half-witted companies that tried to reduce what we previously did to a series of formulas and catch phrases.

We were referred to as “wordsmiths,” a truly disgusting label if there ever was one, and urged to become familiar with SEO, a pathetic practice I won’t even grant the respect of spelling out for you, nor for SEM, its even cheaper cousin. (Trust me, you don’t need to know these things.)

Anyway, it’s all nonsense, albeit of the multi-billion-dollar variety, to simply pander to the algorithms presumably guiding the way Google sorts content and thereby determines which stories rise to the top and which fall deep into the benthos, where many creatures do not even have eyes. Reading there is impossible, obviously, so who needs writers?

But now comes the robots. And it isn’t those of us who love language who should be scared; it’s the mightiest of the mighty gate-keepers, Google itself, that is cowering in fear from that pesky little nuisance called Chat GPT.

Google is so scared it’s had to recall one of its playboy billionaire co-founders, though not the one who lent his name to page rank, to try and right the ship. But it’s much too late. The inmates, aka robots, are already running the asylum — by design.

Meanwhile, all of those marketing folks who are misappropriating the word “creative” for their work when what they actually do is suppress creativity in the name of maximizing profits had better start running for their lives from the coming of the chatbots. And so it gives me great pleasure to announce that the likes of Buzzfeed will finally lose their buzz..

Because there’s no greater buzzkill than finding out that your invisibility cloak isn’t going to work any more.

P.S. Friends, do not misread my comments to think that I hate Google. I love Google; it’s my favorite company. It was love at first sight/site, actually, a long time ago. It is the blood-sucking barnacles attached to Google’s underbelly that I despise.

Kudos to Kelly Main for an excellent piece that helped me see the light — “ChatGPT Comes With a Surprising Benefit That No One Is Talking About--but Everyone Benefits From” (Inc.)

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