Scrolling back through some of my 69,996 unopened emails (the appalling tally will have ticked up by the time this column reaches you) I reflect contentedly on what I have missed. News of the \u201cstate-of-the-art fishing vessel\u201d commissioned by Fisheries Development Oman drifted past me unnoticed. So did the redundant information (elaborated at considerable length) that \u201cReddit is buzzing with dedicated communities\u201d. And I could probably have guessed without even clicking on the email that a newly opened \u201cmajor sculpture installation\u201d would reference \u201chistories of enslavement and the architecture of dispossession to further examine human geography and propose spatial liberation strategies\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Harvard Business Review proposes the engaging neologism \u201cworkslop\u201d to describe the proliferation of AI-generated text that is clogging modern offices with pointless emails, reports and presentations. My professional proximity to the public relations industry leads me to suspect the phenomenon precedes the automation of white-collar labour.<\/p>\n
My sympathy is nevertheless stirred by reports of beleaguered employees who complain that their colleagues are using AI to produce \u201clarge blocks of text\u201d in order to foster the illusion of productivity. Workers dump middens of pointless content into each other\u2019s in-trays, which must then be sifted for elusive signs of meaning. It was \u201cconfusing to understand what was actually going on in the email\u201d, laments a man who spent more than an hour trying to decode an AI-generated message.<\/p>\n
If, as the management theorist Stafford Beer famously suggested, \u201cthe purpose of a system is what it does\u201d, the purpose of western civilisation might be described, with only a little exaggeration, as the production of text. It is a strange paradox that as reading and literacy decline, our society vomits forth an ever greater daily flood of forms, reports, presentations, legal verbiage, PR bumf and rambling Facebook statuses. In this context, Sam Altman\u2019s megalomaniac boast that ChatGPT produces a hundred billion words a day<\/a> seems less a symptom of a revolution in human affairs than the logical conclusion of a nightmare already running out of control.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a decade since it was discovered, to general unsurprise, that PayPal\u2019s terms of service agreement was, at 50,000 words, longer than Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet. A more recent report found that no UK bank presents its users with terms and conditions of fewer than 10,000 words. Two million new academic journal articles are produced every year, of which half, according to a notorious statistic, are never read by more than three people: the author, the referee and the editor.<\/p>\n A world-weary journalist once remarked to me that nowadays the point of writing a book is not for people to read it (mostly, they won\u2019t). Rather, the fact a publisher had trusted you to produce 80,000 words of text on a given subject gives you the imprimatur of authority required to appear on podcasts, give talks and go on the radio.<\/p>\n Many reasons may be sought for this insanity: it is in the logic of a risk-averse bureaucratised society to swaddle every conceivable human action in forms and reports. Reverence for text-generation is probably compounded by a culture of mass education in which the most statusful thing a young person can do is to spend three years churning out words of generally indifferent quality.<\/p>\n