The scenario of humans paid to clean up A.I. mistakes is already a reality

Forget prompt engineer. The real job in the A.I. economy is editor: a human being who spends hours polishing something a so-called “artificial intelligence” spat out in millisecond so that it’s actually usable.

The members of the Writers Guild of America worried, rightly so, that Hollywood studios wanted to replace human screenwriters with A.I., and then pay editors peanuts to shape up A.I.-generated screenplays into actually workable shooting scripts.

That’s already happening for other kinds 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 tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. “It was really engaging work,” Miller says, a chance to flex his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller’s manager told him about a new project. “They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” he says. …

A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form, an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT’s subpar text to make it sound more human.

By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller’s team, and he was alone. “All of a sudden I was just doing everyone’s job,” Miller says. Every day, he’d open the AI-written documents to fix the robot’s formulaic mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people.

These companies want quality content like human writers and artists can create, without having to pay human writers and artists what they deserve. The A.I. are still unable to create content that doesn’t need serious human editing.

Sometimes you can spend a lot of time massaging a prompt and the best you can get is something that you have to turn over to a human writer or artist to shape into what you need.

Supposedly A.I. is a great equalizer, putting small businesses on an equal footing with large corporations. But the big corporations have the budget to pay editors, whereas a small business owner might have to do that work all by himself.

I know a woman, call her “Taesha,” who runs a couple of different businesses. She needs imagery for both of them. I wanted to use up a bunch of my NightCafe credits, so I was happy to spend like 300 of my credits on a whole bunch of different prompt and preset combinations.

Taesha and I obtained several images that were almost but not quite what she needed. We also got a lot more in which the A.I. completely ignored words we had added to the prompt based on what we saw in previous output, to try to steer it closer to what Taesha wanted. And we also got a few images that just made us say “What the hell!?”

Taesha chose one of the better images and hired a human artist to tweak it into what she needed. In the meantime, Taesha earned some NightCafe credits of her own and used them to generate images for her other business. And though she got a lot better at writing prompts and choosing presets, she still needed to hire a human artist to get an image that conformed to her brand kit.

The A.I. economy has also created jobs detecting A.I.-created content and tweaking A.I. algorithms to create content that evades A.I. detection. After being laid off from his job editing A.I.-generated copy,

Miller found a new, if rather ironic, opportunity. He got a job at Undetectable AI, a technology company that builds software to make AI writing harder to identify. In other words, Miller is helping a company that’s using AI to do the work he was forced into after AI took his job in the first place.

So Miller landed on his feet. Kind of. But not really.