AI

By Denise Renée Purdie

I’ve been seeing a number of jobs that basically want you to help AI get better so they can in turn seemingly put more people out of work. Previously, automated jobs were the ones that were really the most vulnerable although I’ll have to see how long ago AI beat a chess master. I remember Eliza from decades ago when we started talking about when the robots were going to take over. Let’s table that conversation for a bit though.

The graphic design industry is also being shaken up. A friend of mine, a fellow poet, shared some designs with me that seemed to suit one of his poems perfectly. They were generated with a couple of keywords. And I know since I’m not an illustrator, I often use royalty-free images to design and get my books out affordably.

At present, writers, even poets, are facing some competition from AI. Ironically though, and what led let me to write this post, is seeing a number of jobs that are seeking creators to help AI get better at copywriting and even poetry. Or they are being hired to make AI generated copy more human … I remember when I first heard about this I wondered how long it would be before AI would write its first novel.

During a discussion with someone in the last few days, I started thinking about the jobs in the future that humans will be in a unique position to do. I believe it will be high-end, technical jobs or jobs that require intuitive leaps of faith combined with science and also possibly jobs that delve into the mind like psychology. It would be interesting to look at whether psychological treatment can be mimicked by AI. I know there are a series of questions that you can ask to begin, but since there are so many responses a patient can give, I’m not sure if the branches in logic would cover that or if the empathy required can be built into an AI system.

I’m also not sure if we can call it a brave new world out here, but we can certainly say we live in interesting times. And I remember that being a curse in Terry Pratchett books!

Editor’s note:

'May you live in interesting times' is the worst thing one can wish on a citizen of Discworld, especially on the distinctly unmagical Rincewind, who has had far too much perilous excitement in his life and can't even spell wizard.

Keywords: AI, poetry, interesting times, Terry Pratchett