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?
Denne historien er fra September 13, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra September 13, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Starlink's conquest of the Amazon leaves Brazil in a dilemma
The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from it into the caiman-inhabited waters below.
Dalai Lama's mountain town feels the strain of tourist boom
SUVs and saloon cars pass slowly along McLeod Ganj's narrow one-way Jogiwara Road, blaring horns at pedestrians and scooter riders and playing loud music.
'I am all the world' The brutal rule of a West Bank settler
Palestinians tell ofblacklisted Yakov's reign across the Jabal Salman valley and heisjust one of many violent bosses
Stormy waters New flashpoint emerges in South China Sea dispute
Hopes that tensions in the South China Sea might ease have been short lived.
'Justice delayed' Why trust in public inquiries to bring closure is fading
After the final report of the Grenfell fire inquiry was published, Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in the blaze, said: \"We did not ask for this inquiry... It's delayed the justice my family deserves.\"
Celeriac soup with almond pangrattato
I'm not ashamed to say that as soon as September hits, my stick blender comes out. Just as I embrace salads when the clocks go forward in the UK, I wholeheartedly throw myself into soup season once the summer holidays end. Autumn is approaching in the northern hemisphere and I'm ready with my ladle. Celeriac is one of my favourite soup heroes, because it gives the creamiest, silkiest finish with little effort. You don't have to make the almond pangrattato, but it is a wonderful addition.
Are smoke signals telling me to make an oil change in the kitchen?
Should you that is, not can you) cook with extra-virgin olive oil? Antonio, Atlanta, Georgia, US
Going underground
A darkly humorous encounter between an American spy-cop and the members ofan eco-commune she is hired to infiltrate
All work and no play
Hard Graft, a powerfulnew London exhibition, focuses onworkers’ exploitation, from the ruined hands ofa washerwoman to mothers forced to sell their bodies
What the princess and the shaman tell us about hereditary privilege
It should have been an Instagram-perfect wedding image, but it turned out to be something more embarrassing.
