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 “state-of-the-art fishing vessel” commissioned by Fisheries Development Oman drifted past me unnoticed. So did the redundant information (elaborated at considerable length) that “Reddit is buzzing with dedicated communities”. And I could probably have guessed without even clicking on the email that a newly opened “major sculpture installation” would reference “histories of enslavement and the architecture of dispossession to further examine human geography and propose spatial liberation strategies”.
The Harvard Business Review proposes the engaging neologism “workslop” 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.
My sympathy is nevertheless stirred by reports of beleaguered employees who complain that their colleagues are using AI to produce “large blocks of text” in order to foster the illusion of productivity. Workers dump middens of pointless content into each other’s in-trays, which must then be sifted for elusive signs of meaning. It was “confusing to understand what was actually going on in the email”, laments a man who spent more than an hour trying to decode an AI-generated message.
If, as the management theorist Stafford Beer famously suggested, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, 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’s megalomaniac boast that ChatGPT produces a hundred billion words a day seems less a symptom of a revolution in human affairs than the logical conclusion of a nightmare already running out of control.
It’s a decade since it was discovered, to general unsurprise, that PayPal’s terms of service agreement was, at 50,000 words, longer than Shakespeare’s 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.
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’t). 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.
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.
More tendentiously, perhaps, I find myself unable to shake the feeling that there is something quasi-mystical about our present attitude to text. I am reminded of an observation made by the great media theorist Walter Ong that many pre-literate societies consider words to have “magical potency”. In the cargo cults of the South Sea islands “orders, bills of lading, receipts” and other documents were used in ritual ceremonies intended to conjure aeroplanes full of bounty out of empty skies. Other traditional societies newly exposed to literacy use scraps of writing as amulets or scrawl out meaningless text-like symbols in the hope they will confer power or status.
Our increasingly post-literate society is characterised by a similar pointless reverence for the written (or generated) word. Companies swathe themselves in impenetrable legalese to ward off lawsuits. The verbiage that lines the walls of art galleries or bulks out company reports is not really meant to be understood. It is there to confer status (I’m convinced the proliferation of jargon in the 21st century may be partly explained by the fact that an increasing quantity of text is not really meant to be read).
Text can be a form of heavy artillery. HR departments and head teachers are reportedly bombarded with enormous machine-generated complaints that aim to subdue by their sheer volume. In the Times Educational Supplement, one academy chief executive, Lawrence Foley, records that he received an AI-generated “45-page letter” from an outraged parent, adding “our schools are getting five or six of these a week”.
In a recent book, Breakneck, the China analyst Dan Wang charts the divergence between America and China. China, he warns, is a dynamic nation of engineers and the US a sclerotic nation of lawyers (Wang’s killer fact is that all nine members of the Politburo standing committee are engineers, while every Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee between 1984 and 2020 was a law school graduate). Where engineers get things done, he argues, lawyers mire a nation in process, red tape and consultation.
The other thing lawyers do, of course, is produce words. It would be grandiose to imply that to solve the productivity crisis and save western civilisation all we need to do is stem the deluge of meaningless text. But then I check my email inbox (70,036 emails now — not so bad) and think, well … it might be a start.