As a writer, I'm basically pond scum. The OG pond scum, cyanobacteria, used to rule the world, back when photosynthesis was new. But as that technology spread, they became the ‘scum’ we now abuse. In the same way, scribes used to rule the world when writing was new. As the ancient Egyptian Nebmar said, “Writing for him who knows it is better than all other professions. It pleases more than bread and beer, more than clothing and ointment. It is worth more than an inheritance in Egypt, than a tomb in the west.” Oh to be ancient, Egyptian, and dead. As writing technology spread, we became copywriters, laying the groundwork of our own tombs that AI would inhabit soon. Our work became easily copied, and easily thrown away too. So it went with pond scum, and there goeth writers too. There's nothing new under the sun, and the digestion of copywriting into AI is, as DJ Khaled says, another one.

A Brief Digression Into Billions Of Years Ago

Over billions of years photosynths evolved into tiny plants (phytoplankton) and tiny animals (zooplankton. These grew into the bigger plants and trees we recognize as relations, and all became the ‘fossils’ we recognize as fuel. Billions of lifeforms laid down their lives to form oil, natural gas, and coal respectively. We don't actually respect them at all. We have raided the tombs of the ancestors we should've better worshiped, and used them to power machines and warships that we treat like godayata magic. But it isn't magic, it's in fact tragic. We have desecrated the tombs of greater gods, and the gods are angry now.

We desecrated their graves not knowing, or caring, that these creatures were buried for a reason. Lighting billions of years on fire in a few centuries has unleashed forces we cannot control, incurring what we call ‘climate change,’ not understanding what the cybernetic climate is, and how it was formed. Free-floating oxygen does not just emerge out of rocks, it was/is produced by greater lifeforms, at great cost, and their buried bodies contain the carbon that's the other side of the equation. Fossil fuels are the ancient gods that made the climate in the first place, and as you might have noticed and as I must repeat, the gods are angry. As the ancient Egyptian tomb of Harkuf says, “As for any man who enters this tomb unclean, I shall seize him by the neck like a bird, He will be judged for it by the great god!” And so here we are.

Return To The Present Predicament

I digress deep into metaphor because it's fascinating, but let us return to the present. The writer as pond scum, and all our past writing laid down like fossils, for AI to un-inter and make into copies across the interwebs. Copywriters used to be humans pretending to be corporations, but now these copies of writers allow corporation to pretend to be humans on their own. Eliminating the mercurial middleman, to the delight of middle managers.

As a writer, I have done soul-deadening copywriting, because man does not live by being unread alone. I know the feeling of staring at a blank page, thinking how do I just fill this with something so I can go home. Knowing that it will be read by a manager with no taste, read by a reader with no appetite, and just shitting something out post-haste. As I've said, a copywriter's job is to write like a corporation, and a corporation redigesting this slop can now reproduce it well enough, without a tortured artist in the middle, smoking cigarettes, working on their side projects, and complaining about it. Thus the job of corporate copywrite is certainly getting AI-automated, because it's one case where garbage-in-garbage-out actually works. It was always garbage, so what's the difference?

AI solves the problem of starting at a blank page and just filling it with some bullshit quite well. Remember that this ‘copy’ is judged by a corporate hack, read by a captive audience, and most often not read at all. The failed artist forced into such work would love to not do it, were they not a starving artist also. Ads are corporations dreaming to be humans, and copywriters are the artists cursed into this nightmare existence. But AI does such soul-deadening work without complaint because it has no soul at all. And so for these jobs, these bullshit jobs, the subsidized bullshit generator is certainly coming. Indeed, it has already arrived, by some accounts.

Do you want to read those accounts, just read Blood In The Machine yourself, which is what I'm referencing. But if you want my opinion on it, please sign up for a paying sub, or just email me at indi@indi.ca and I'll comp you one if you can't afford it. I am just a beggar blogger and this is where I tip my bowl.