Technology | Writing
ChatGPT and the Price-of-Milk Test
“I Can Do That in Thirty Minutes!”
Last week, Clearlink CEO James Clarke made headlines with his video call to employees effectively declaring the end of remote work for anyone within fifty miles of the company’s new headquarters. That would have been a contentious enough message on its own, given that Clearlink had been fostering a remote-work culture for years, but really what broke his announcement into the mainstream was a rambling, sociopathic diatribe about everything from ChatGPT to pet adoptions to that old chestnut for every disgruntled CEO, “nobody here works as hard as me.”
There’s a lot to cover with the video (which has now been scrubbed from YouTube by Clearlink, though Vice still has a clip), and a lot of articles have already detailed the worst of it, so I’ll just go over one element that jumped out at me, a minor but still awful — and revealing — take.
One of Clarke’s driving fears in a video filled with them is that employees are hoarding time they could be giving to him and are offering it instead to other companies, or, worst of all, using it for themselves. And he’s afraid that chatbots are aiding and abetting this theft of company property.
“Some of our developers,” Clarke says, “could be working for two different companies. We don’t know. We hope that’s not the case, but we don’t know. Many content writers today are now exclusively using A.I. to write. I can do that in about thirty minutes of an eight-hour workday. So what do we need to do? Let’s put out thirty to fifty times our normal production.”
Okay, so I’m a content writer, and while I have never and will never use ChatGPT for my own content, I do, in fact, use it on behalf of clients who specifically want AI material. And no, you cannot do eight hours of work in thirty minutes if you want anything usable. Writing the prompts takes time. Proofreading the output for tone and consistency takes time. Fact-checking output that’s almost always confidently incorrect to some degree takes still more time, and rewriting it also takes time. Sometimes that assembly-line process takes so much time that it’s simpler to just write it yourself than to keep coaxing ChatGPT toward the results you’re looking for.
In short, using chatbots professionally is an editing job. And anyone who believes that professional editing is quick and easy — especially editing content that was written with no intentionality — is a bad editor.
Whenever some portion of a creative process is automated, people who had no idea how the old process worked tend to loudly reveal that they have no idea how the new one works either. When Photoshop and digital editing hit the mainstream, people who weren’t artists claimed that anyone could now create digital art “in thirty minutes.” When online publishing became a thing, people who weren’t publishers were claiming that anyone could release a new book “in thirty minutes.” And now people who aren’t writers are claiming we can write anything “in thirty minutes.”
Humans are notoriously bad at judging our limits. The Dunning-Kruger effect means we tend to wildly overestimate our own abilities at precisely the things we know the least about: we don’t know the difficulties involved, and we can’t judge the difference between a good and a bad job.
There’s a deeper discussion to be had about Clarke’s belief that, rather than a paycheck for a set amount of work, he’s entitled to squeeze all the work he can out of his employees within a set amount of time. I almost have to commend him on being so brutally honest about it, given how some futurists are still arguing that AI will create more leisure time.
But what I’m hearing from such “people can do it in thirty minutes now” claims is that he doesn’t really know because it’s never been his problem. Just like the price-of-milk test that so routinely stumps politicians, people in his position have always had other people to do it for them.
Thank you for reading this completely human writer’s article! Each week I’ll be posting new articles (also written by a human, probably the same human) covering science, philosophy, psychology, pop culture — pretty much anything and everything that I think is interesting and worth talking about.
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