Each week, I write for a tech company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are novelists, academics and other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.
That's because we aren't even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.
Large language models (LLMS) such as ChatGPT have made it possible to automate huge swathes of linguistic life, from summarising any amount of text to drafting emails, essays and even entire novels. These tools appear so good at writing, they have become synonymous with the very idea of artificial intelligence.
But before they ever risk leading to a godlike superintelligence or devastating mass unemployment, they first need training. Instead of using these chatbots to automate us out of our livelihoods, tech companies are contracting us to help train their models.
The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data the model needs to be fed. The "AI" needs an example of what "good" looks like before it can try to produce "good" writing.
As well as providing our model with such "gold standard" material, we are also helping it attempt to avoid "hallucinating" - a poetic term for telling lies. We do so by feeding it examples that use a search engine and cite sources. Without seeing writing that does this, it cannot learn to do so by itself.
Hold on. 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 in every book ever written. So what happens when the last pamphlet and papyrus have been digitised and the model is still not perfect? What happens when we run out of words?
Esta historia es de la edición September 13, 2024 de The Guardian Weekly.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición September 13, 2024 de The Guardian Weekly.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Friendship interrupted
They were best mates. Then one had a baby, while the other struggled to conceive. They share their brutally honest takes on what happens when motherhood affects friendship
KERNELS OF HOPE
During the siege of Leningrad, botanists in charge of an irreplaceable seed collection, the first of its kind, had to protect it from fire, rodents-and hunger
A new horizon' The inverse link between cancer and dementia
Scientists have long been aware of a curious connection between these common and feared diseases. At last, a clearer picture is emerging
Across the universe
Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize with a novel set in space. Yet, she says, Orbital is actually 'a celebration of Earth's beauty with a pang of loss'
Frank Auerbach 1931 -2024
Saved from the Holocaust, this artist captured the devastation of postwar Britain as ifits wounds were his own but he ultimately found salvation in painting
Seven lessons I've learned after 28 years as economics editor
Margaret Thatcher was Britain's prime minister and Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour party.
Droughtstricken dam leaves economies powerless
A ll is not well with the waters of Lake Kariba, the world's human-made lake largest A punishing drought has drained the huge reservoir close to record lows, raising the prospect that the Kariba Dam, which powers the economies of Zambia and Zimbabwe, may have to shut down for the first time in its 65-year history.
Let this be the end of these excruciating celebrity endorsements
I wish celebrities would learn the art of the French exit. But they can't, which is why Eva Longoria has announced she no longer lives in America. \"I get to escape and go somewhere,\" she explained.
Alive, but unable to thrive under absolute patriarchy
Since the Taliban returned to power, women and girls have tried defiance, but despair at their harshly restricted lives
‘It's tragic’ Reflection in the wake of Amsterdam violence
Carrying signs scrawled with messages urging unity, they laid white roses at the statue of Anne Frank, steps away from the home where her family had hidden from Nazi persecution.
