I rooted for the Luddites when the “Planet Money” podcast talked about them. Who wouldn’t sympathize with these angry skilled textile workers – weavers and artisans – who smashed machinery in the early 1800’s? I would be angry too if the invention of power looms rendered my skillset – my ability to earn family-sustaining wages – useless.
I’m the daughter of a man who refused to sign up for EZ Pass for driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because the technology eliminated the roles of unionized tollbooth workers. My dad insisted on using the staffed tollbooths up until the very end so that he could “stick it to the turnpike commission.” So, I have family precedent for my feelings.
Then, my own employer made it extremely clear to its stakeholders that it had invested a considerable amount of money into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that it would continue to invest in Artificial Intelligence. Also, I learned that my job workflow and job prospects would change as a result of this investment.
I took the optional (at this time) AI prompt engineering training that my employer offered to those of us in non-technical roles.
Why would I do a thing like that? I’m sure that you, too, have read the stuff on Reddit about how AI steals intellectual property and ruins people’s livelihoods. I write a little bit of fan fiction – well, I used to write fan fiction. I stopped posting it after I read that somebody trains AI bots on the stuff that other people write and post. Whenever I ask ChatGPT to write something for me, it comes back with a bunch of stuff that looks like it was ripped off of someone else’s blog.
Here’s why: I have been out of college for a long time and I don’t want to be obsolete. The summer after I graduated, I got a job at Walmart. Most of our training was on a computer. Our training class had to sign into the computers together. One of the ladies in my class had a great deal of difficulty signing into a computer. I don’t want to be that lady.
One of the first things that I learned during my employer-sponsored AI prompt engineering training was that I had already learned some of the stuff in the training as a young kid.
Every class at Berlin Brothersvalley Elementary School performed in either a winter or spring musical. These weren’t Broadway shows. The lines and the song lyrics were all exposition meant to educate us. One year, our spring show was titled “How the West was Really Won” and the entire thing was a (very sanitized) history lesson about Manifest Destiny.
One or two springs before that, we did a show about Information Technology. The main characters were stuck in a computer. They had to defend themselves from evil creatures called “Glitches.” My class sang the following chorus, “Garbage in, garbage out. There’s no doubt. If you put garbage in, then you’ll get garbage out. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.“
That’s actually the only part of the musical that I remember. However, as I discovered from my AI prompt engineer traning, it was a good thing for me to remember. Because the key point from one of my lessons was the mantra “garbage in, garbage out.”
I don’t want this blog to look like AI slop (garbage). So, I need to understand what AI slop looks like. For instance, I didn’t know how to finish this blog post. I fed what I had already written into ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to finish the post in the persona of Jenny. I studied what ChatGPT wrote for me. I didn’t like any of it, so I trashed it all. However, it was a good way for me to study how not to write.
In the end, the Luddites didn’t stop the Industrial Revolution from happening. The Luddites didn’t stop the robber barons from emerging. Some part of me hopes that some of the displaced skilled artisans took what they learned about textile mills and used this knowledge to open their own textile mills. Not that I want them to be the capitalist villains in a Dickens novel. Hopefully they made just enough money to keep their families out of poverty, but not at other people’s expense. That’s probably an unrealistic wish because that’s just not the way that things worked in England in 1811.
I can’t promise you that this blog won’t ever look like AI slop. However, even if it does look like AI slop, it will not be because AI wrote it. This blog will continue to be my own words.
