Article in The Guardian by Jack Apollo George, 9/7/24
Headline: “If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes: confessions of a chatbot helper”
Subhead: “Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them”
“Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for?
“Well, for starters, the internet is finite. And so too is the sum of every word on every page of every book ever written. So what happens when the last pamphlet, papyrus and prolegomenon have been digitised and the model is still not perfect? What happens when we run out of words?
“The date for that linguistic apocalypse has already been set. Researchers announced in June that we can expect this to take place between 2026 and 2032 “if current LLM development trends continue”. At that point, “Models will be trained on datasets roughly equal in size to the available stock of public human text data.”
. . . “And therein lies the ultimate irony. Here is a new economic phenomenon that rewards writing, that encourages it, that truly values it; all while simultaneously deeming it an encumbrance, a problem to be solved, an inefficiency to be automated away. It is like being paid to write in sand, to whisper secrets into a slab of butter. Even if our words could make a dent, we wouldn’t ever be able to recognize it.”
