Member-only story
Welcome To The Slop Factory
I thought we were in a two tier “AI” society, but it’s become a bit more complicated than that. I think it’s three.
I made the mistake of opening LinkedIn the other day in the misguided belief that I’d be able to quickly scan the job market, reaffirm the belief that I’m astoundingly underpaid, and perhaps land a post either back in academia or on some forward looking hyper-technical think tank that has an excellent coffee machine and pays for my home internet connection.
I can but hope, I suppose. Like any jobs in LinkedIn actually include an accurate pay scale, usually it’s €0-€1m or something equally banal, and I’d be able to get an actual job specification without being forced to engage some acronym deficient desk jockey via booking them via Calendly or something. The hubris of them all, like their time is more valuable than mine!
But, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that, after wading through the same recycled sales memes, motivational claptrap, and various thought leaders all trying to get you to sign up to some mailing list or other (and get their “free” ebook) that I had a very eerie, and familiar, feeling.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with LLMs lately². Some would call them AI, but I prefer the term “AI” as it’s the quotation marks that the most important in the name and not the letters…
