Synthesizing the Businessmen-Smile (plus a ton of links)

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I published this article and links on my Substack here (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) and here (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). Thanks for your ongoing support.

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Image: Businessman Smile / Stable Diffusion

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A politician has given a speech in congress written by an AI (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), which might be the first instance of synthetic content being used in politics.

When U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss decided to deliver a speech on a bill that would create a U.S.-Israel artificial intelligence center, he opted to let the AI do the talking. The brief two-paragragh speech read by the Massachusetts Democrat on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday was generated by the online AI chatbot ChatGPT. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress. (…)The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide."

Seemingly unrelated, this (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) viral tweet is making the rounds and its showing the (seemingly) future of job recruitment through synthetic application generation.

I think both are related.

Ryan Broderick yesterday wrote a compelling piece (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) about how these things automatize social process in job application. It is a good argument, but I disagree respectfully.

In both instances, the political speech and the job , AI writing political speech and job applications, the only thing that gets automatized is the political leveling of the field. Let me explain.

When you write a job application, or a political speech, you stick to formulas, which are algorithms. There is quite literally no difference if you pay an application consult to help you with your bland and formulaic job application, or paying OpenAI a buck for ChatGPT to do that job.

This stuff is bland, neutral and it doesn't surprise or risks offending anyone (its your voter/employer, so you maybe shouldn't risk offend them). Job applications and political talk is soothing and smooth nothingtalk, political PR speak for a cause.

Texts like these have zero edge, no texture and no personality, and that’s on purpose. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because you want to meet the target of your communication on a leveled field, where both parties know exactly what the other one expects, and then those expectations are met.

Like a featureless business suit, texts like these offer marginalized, minimal creativity, and AI is perfect for this sort of thing: Job applications, PR text, copywriting and so forth. All of these require formulaic, noncreative text generation. In this kind of writing, there is actually a demand for minimized creativity.

If you are actually creative as a writer of political speeches, you may offend your voter base and loose. If you are actually creative for PR text or as a copywriter, you do not maximize the market outcome. In jobs like these, creativity is stiffled, it’s caged creativity brought down to a minimum.

Sure, you might say, but it’s a big problem of our times that political speech has no character, no style, no personality. And you’d be right, but [insert your fav polit-clown here] still has a pen, right? She might use it. If you have to get creative with a job app, you can paint it too.

Bland, empty political talk has been around since the cambrian explosion, and bullshit jobs not only deserve bullshit text, they love it like that. This is also why i really hesitate to feel sorry for the people who will loose jobs in those sectors (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). It’s industrial, technical, mechanized work in a business suit, and who really cares about that.

Highly intellectual excurse in this classic George Carlin bit on businessmen (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), surely no bland empty talk in this one, i promise.

What AI is automatizing here is George Carlins "big bullshit businessmen smile", and i actually think, business rhetorics and political speech is more authentic this way, if you know what i mean.

When AI is able to generate an actually funny synthetic George Carlin (which rhymes and writes 7 dirty words you can't say on Twitter), then i'll worry. Until then, it's just stochastic parrots producing bullshit for bullshit jobs.

However, we need to talk about UBI in an AI world, pronto.

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