How ChatGPT would have changed my life
AI wouldn't have let me get my foot in the door
After a year in Russia learning to speak the язык I put my sweater, Kindle, 7’’ Henckels kitchen knife and other assorted possibles in a backpack and moved to Ukraine. I had a few thousand bucks in the bank and the untarnished optimism that comes standard issue with being young. To stretch my dollars I did some volunteering in exchange for a place to sleep, but as the Grivna wore thin I realized I needed a job.
In college my friends paid me to write their papers so I figured I might as well try my hand at the writing game. I created an Upwork account and without any credentials or past experience to grease the gears of prosperity, I began applying for the most menial jobs listed on that god-forsaken platform.
The first gig I landed, and I’ll remember this till my final breath, was rewriting kitchenware descriptions. For example, one of the product lines on my new boss’s website was the ample, pear-shaped carafe. Growing up in a one-stoplight town with more cows than culture, I’d never heard of a carafe and I found the entire concept to be whimsical. But hey, rich people like funny things.
My job was to take the description of each carafe and rewrite it into something new. Then the same treatment for assorted kitchen plates, silverware, soup ladles, frying pans, etc. I rewrote hundreds of descriptions until the job was done and done right. I got $50, or whatever slave labor wage I’d agreed to, and a glowing review. I used that review to get a slightly better job, and then an even better job after that, working my way up the ladder of respectability. A few years later I had so many good reviews that I even landed a job working for a wealthy New Yorker.
Before further story expansion, allow me to offer a paragraph of advice to aspiring freelancers. You want to know the secret to success? Treat every single job as if your life depends on the outcome. Getting good reviews from the clients is all that matters. Nobody cares what college you went to or whether you're a diversity hire. The client only cares that you’re going to do the job well and finish the damn thing on time.
ChatGPT
So we've established that I got my start in the highly lucrative field of freelance writing by rejiggering carafe descriptions. If ChatGPT was around at the time, and had existed long enough to have achieved widespread adoption, it's unlikely I ever would have gotten that job. Rewriting is the perfect, menial task for our new AI overlords, and the $50 I got would be 100x more than it costs for an AI to do the same task. But what about the human touch, you might argue? Well, let’s have a look at what ChatGPT can do with a description. This is the 2nd paragraph from my Substack’s bio.
I’m interested in figuring out just what the hell is going on here… Anyone can bemoan the absurdities in today’s zeitgeist but who can answer: why is this happening? My goal with this Substack is to write about the non-obvious forces governing our society so that we can see the world clearly, especially as it relates to making wise decisions with our money.
I gave that to ChatGPT and asked for a rewrite. Here’s the unedited reply that I received.
I am curious about the underlying causes of the strange phenomena occurring in our society and want to understand them better. My aim with this Substack is to examine and clarify the less obvious factors that shape our society, particularly as they relate to financial decision-making. My goal is to help us gain a clearer understanding of the world around us.
Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough for some bloke who just wants a slightly different description of a carafe so that his website will trend better? Yes. And let us not forgot, this bloody thingamajig has been available to the public for 3 weeks. What the hell is it going to be outputting in 3 years, let alone 13 years?
If ChatGPT had existed when I was just getting started I would have found it crushingly difficult to get my first job as a freelance writer. In fact it’s not clear that I would have been able to get any work at all. That paucity of employment would have reshaped my life. I might not have been able to travel the world and do all sorts of epic adventuring, and my memory bank would be the poorer for it.
In the last few days I’ve read hundreds of YouTube comments under videos about ChatGPT. Many people recognize that this new tech is going to reshape society, however, others have expressed doubt…
Maybe ChatGPT is good enough to replace a bad programmer’s job, but not me I’m a senior dev
ChatGPT can do that basic shit, but it sucks at writing hobbly-gobbly Python scripts
Who gives a damn, it can’t even think
Come back when it can do some real debugging
The stories it writes all have the same structure… Can we just take a second to appreciate that we’re criticizing a story writing AI because its plot structure is one-dimensional? What a time to be alive.
These criticisms may all be true, in so far as it goes, but it fails to address the problem: ChatGPT is already good enough or will soon be good enough to do many of the most elementary tasks that are typically used as a training ground for the next generation of professionals.
If remove the bottom rungs of the workforce ladder, what are the long term consequences? I don’t mean just for my hedonistic desire to drink beer on a beach in Thailand, I mean for every profession that exists on a computer. If ChatGPT is good enough to do the programming work that a recent college graduate usually tackles, are companies still going to hire that recent graduate? How are we going to train the next crop of senior developers if they never have the chance to master the basics?
Simple in thought as I am, it seems like pulling the bottom rungs out of the competence ladder could create an unusually unskilled workforce twenty years in the future.
The hard landing
I’m glad I got started when I did. I wouldn’t want to be trying to get into the game right now, and I feel bad for people who are in that situation. Be they freelance writers, programmers, journalists, marketers, whatever. Or, as it turns out, graphic designers. ChatGPT led me to discover image generating programs that do a bang-up job and can already create pictures that are surprisingly astonishingly good. Hello graphic designers class of 2023, meet the competition that works 24/7 for $2 an hour.
I’m not naive enough to believe that my own prospects are secured, but I do hope that I have enough time to develop a creative moat before the AI starts its domination run. And if not, well… At least I already finished the beach-drinking at 11 am stage of my life. In and out before the AI took it all, and for that I’m thankful.
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“it seems like pulling the bottom rungs out of the competence ladder could create an unusually unskilled workforce twenty years in the future.”
Yep.
Automation has already taken away so many good jobs; try getting a job as a radio DJ.
And that’s just one example. It’s taken away a wonderful, enjoyable way for music nerds to make a living.
And it’s destroyed everything good about listening to the radio. Algorithms have sanitized playlists to utter inanity. And there used to be comfort in knowing that there was a real person sitting in a real booth somewhere across town, and if you were feeling lonely, especially in the middle of the night, you could turn on the radio and here a person’s voice, and be reassured that reality exists and you’re not alone.
AI has existed for years now, in my opinion, and it’s already taken away so much that’s good, without adequately compensating us for what we’ve lost.
We don’t have to let it be this way, but most people act like it’s inevitable.
Don't worry, the economic consecuences of A.I. will eventually reach the retired. Kisses.