"Now, he was tasked with polishing up the AI's lackluster prose, and, to quote the BBC, "make it sound more human." If only there was a way of doing that with, uh, human writers.
Soon, Miller was the only human employee left on the team. It was down to him, and him alone, to fix up all the AI-generated articles.
"All of a sudden I was just doing everyone's job," Miller told the BBC. "Mostly, it was just about cleaning things up and making the writing sound less awkward, cutting out weirdly formal or over-enthusiastic language."
"It was more editing than I had to do with human writers, but it was always the exact same kinds of edits," he added. "The real problem was it was just so repetitive and boring. It started to feel like I was the robot."
And so Miller found himself in the unenviable position of legitimizing the intrusion of AI into his very own job by making the extremely fallible models appear more capable than they actually are. This hasn't been a fate exclusive to writers; in the service industry, for example, an army of underpaid, outsourced workers secretly worked behind the scenes to power the "AI" drive-thrus at the fast food chain Checkers."
Miller was cornered into that position, but across the industry, being an AI fixer-upper has quickly become a dominant new form of grunt work.
"We're adding the human touch, but that often requires a deep, developmental edit on a piece of writing," Catrina Cowart, a US-based copywriter who's edited AI text, told the BBC. "It's tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it.""
