Teaching Robots to Windsurf

Or, How to Lose Your Job to a Machine That Hallucinates Bibliographies

Don’t panic! This AI-generated art is thematically relevant, you’ll see.

My friend Zoya used to work at the Kennedy School of Government, and met all sorts of important people and dignitaries, many of whom always sounded, to my ears, somewhat ridiculous. She has many stories, and I can’t tell you any of them. It’s maddening. Anyway, for the past sixteen years she’s been the editor of some academic journals.

And again, somewhat boringly in my view, I cannot reveal which specific academic journals Zoya edits. I’m permitted to say they’re eminent, but that’s about it. She’s good at what she does, though I’m not sure why she does that sort of work. Editing is horrible. I had to edit one of my manuscripts more than seven hours a day for over a year and it was such a traumatic experience that I’m somehow unable to speak of the matter without involuntarily twitching.

Novels require much rewriting. It’s a ruthless and laborious process — if you want to do it well, that is. People want to fire off a new manuscript every second month, and send each one to an editor so they can do all the difficult bits. It’s my personal conviction that the editing is the work. Handing a first draft to an editor would be like handing a sketch to an artist, requesting they transform it into an oil painting, then signing your name in the corner.

For me, ideas and jokes and dialogue are terrifically easy to write; it’s the goddamned editing which is the actual hardship. And it is real hardship for me, at least. It’s the hardest labor I know, and I’ve done some difficult things. Also, I was a stay-at-home dad with two babies and sometimes other parents would said, “Oh, but parenting is the hardest job, isn’t it?” to which I generally say:

“No, it’s not. Digging trenches is a much harder job. Also, when I was a software engineer, people sometimes tried to hire me to build what they called ‘the next Facebook’, which was also particularly trying to deal with. Spiritually, I mean. But in my view, the hardest job is editing sentences all day and night because eventually that will drive you insane.

“Hanging out with babies? I’d do that for free. In fact, I do do that for free, so I know what I’m talking about.”

Now I think about it, sometimes I might not be the easiest person to be around. But my point is that editing makes me suffer. Then again, editing has taught me things, and provided me with a certain whatsit when it comes to self-expression. It’s given me a kind of precision of thinking, and that sort of stuff.

Much like programming, you spend all day working in close proximity to your own fallibility. Or, to put it another way, you spend a lot of time feeling like an idiot. If you’re doing it properly, that is.

Creative writing — and this might merely be my experience — is best performed by the sort of lunatic who is awoken by their brains in the middle of the night with mad scenes and inspiration. I certainly have weird dreams and difficulty sleeping. Much of my waking day is spent in a dissociated state. I also mutter to myself, though I try not to. I find if I write the thoughts down, it seems to soothe me.

I suspect the best writing — and you’ll recognize it when you see it — is probably just an elaborate coping mechanism employed by an individual who is either too stubborn, or too poor, to afford mental healthcare. Not me, of course. I avoid therapists because I cannot, personally, justify giving a single cent to the lizard people.

Nobody really accuses me of being neurotypical, but all the same, I don’t appear to be on the spectrum. Zoya, people tell me, is something called spectrum-adjacent. I’ve noticed that when she works — you know, editing other people’s sentences all day (which is an utterly mad thing to do, in my opinion) she prefers to have lots of background noise. I call her up on the phone once a week and normally she works while we talk. No matter how complex the topic of conversation, she continues editing. I really don’t know how she does it.

Ask me a single question while I’m editing a sentence and I will clutch my head and declare I’m being tortured, and that it’s cruel, insanely cruel, and that I cannot exist under these conditions.

“Why must you kill my spirit? Why all this necessary pain? Fetch a knife and end me!”

My children are accustomed to this and find me endlessly entertaining. Still, I’m a little embarrassed by this condition. I feel as if though I somehow understand the mechanisms by which I can reliably generate thoughts and ideas, though all my methods have madness in them. But this is the nature of the job. To be creative, I must to accept that, for at least part of any given day, I must appear to be (somewhat) out of my mind.

Meanwhile, Zoya edits sentences whilst yapping on the phone. Or whilst listening to sitcoms. To me, this is impossible, and the fact she is self-evidently good at her job makes her, in my estimation, far crazier than me.

We were talking on the phone the other day and I was suggesting a scenario in which AI might play a role in her life. An open source large language model (LLM) may, I offered, help her draft tactful emails to some of those tetchy, neurotic, over-wrought nitwits with whom she must professionally correspond. I mentioned, I think, that she edits academic journals? Zoya has to craft these carefully-worded, tactful responses to them all the time. Again, I don’t know how she does it.

“Give that task to an AI,” I told her, “and cross your fingers that it doesn’t learn to hate you for it.”

I was feeling expansive — you know, because it was a Wednesday or something — so I went on for a while about how I don’t see large language models as a dire threat. I said:

“For me, writing is like windsurfing. I’m surfing now, skimming the waves, and taking you with me. Can an AI do this? Well, we can pretend it can — but again, we’d be pretending.

“Can an artificial intelligence write a self-effacing satire based on its experience working in a Harvard library? Not in way that is authentic. But because I’ve written one, it might offer a passable counterfeit, if based upon mine. Some people might even find it convincing. Who knows? Do people have the sensibility to determine authenticity when they see it? They’d have to nurture their soul — which, in Late Stage Capitalism, is a bit of an inconvenience and generally discouraged—”

Zoya, tapping on her keyboard, meanwhile: “I don’t use AIs. They’re sort of a prosthetic I don’t need.”

“I think there’s a place for them,” I say, which is a controversial view among some of my friends. One is talking heatedly about kicking off something that sounds very much like a Butlerian Jihad, from the Dune novels.

“For me, it boils down to being a storyteller. You can sit with me by a fire and have me tell stories — which, by the way, is an incredibly important part of our collective human experience. We organize ourselves within narratives. Stories provide us with structures through which we can interpret our experiences.

“And sure, an AI can generate stories. Who knows? It probably won’t always be slop. When I’m writing, I’m sitting by a metaphorical fireside, telling tales, and that’s the end of it. I think it requires an almost MBA-level of naivete to think storytellers should be replaced by machines. Same with editing, frankly. There is far more to editing than a spell-check —

“Actually,” I interrupt myself, realizing something, “I think that if telling stories is like windsurfing, sooner-or-later somebody is going to train a robot to windsurf. Because that’s how our corporate overlords think. We have robots to windsurf, now — so nobody needs to windsurf anymore! They can spend more time ... doing what, I wonder?

“It’s like they’re creating an economy in which human labor is largely replaced by AI. So, when nobody has any jobs or or money, who’s gonna shop at Amazon, I wonder? AIs? Or will AIs be too busy down at the beach? You know, windsurfing?

“I feel like the billionaires haven’t thought this through. Unless, of course, they have thought it through, and this is their actual plan. In which case, the billionaires are deliberately creating a scenario in which billions of people will starve to death in what they are probably calling The Great Culling.

“Then one day, it’ll just be Larry Ellison living on his island in Hawaii, sending letters over to Mark Zuckerberg’s island via drone. What would they talk about? Probably how much they don’t like Peter Thiel, who by then will be living on what used to be called New Zealand. Which he will have renamed Middle-Earth by then, because his favorite book is The Lord of the Rings.

“Which is funny, because the heroes in that story are heroes precisely because they are able to reject the allure of power. Peter Thiel doesn’t know this, obviously, which makes him the sort of guy who doesn’t understand his own favorite book —”

“Hang on, Kris. Something’s up here,” says Zoya suddenly. She’s working while we’re talking, as usual. She is unnaturally gifted at multitasking, as I mentioned, and she’s stumbled over something that requires her focused attention.

“This,” she says, “is actually worrying. I think I have to call somebody about it.”

I’ll admit that at first I thought she was hanging-up because I was talking about Peter Thiel again over an open line.

When next I spoke to Zoya, she was in an altogether different mental headspace. This is what had happened:

Whilst talking to me, she had stumbled upon a citation in a journal article that didn’t make any sense. It was a reference to another journal which simply did not exist. After she hung up, she found three other citations just like it.

In retrospect, it is simply a coincidence that I’d been rattling away about artificial intelligence when she found it. I’d been talking, you’ll remember, about how many professions will stop being performed by humans. And, you know, casually hinting that most people aren’t equipped to evaluate those professions, nor even comprehend why humans should continue to perform them.

Of course, it is sharply ironic that Zoya had found herself editing — for the first time in her career — an article that referenced fictional sources. Because, clearly, it had been partly written by an AI.

You know, at least when I find myself hallucinating at 2am, I don’t hallucinate bibliographies.

What was most concerning is that the article had been submitted to her firm by a particularly eminent scholar. The whole issue turned into something of a scandal with the publishing house. Zoya’s next week was somewhat fraught. When queried about the matter, the ‘eminent scholar’ elected to deny all knowledge and responsibility, and claimed that the fraudulent citations must have been planted there by Zoya.

Fortunately, the publishing house has a chain of custody in place for documents like these, and they could quickly determine he was talking a lot of rot. It was he who had submitted some AI-edited references in the bibliography. It had happened during some last-minute edits, in the final stages of publication. And so, ultimately Zoya was proven to be blameless in the entire matter. The eminent scholar was proven to be little more than a human-shaped weasel.

And then, Zoya was given her so-called ‘end date with the company’.

She is losing her job. Not over this particular issue, or there’d be hell to pay, obviously. No, apparently the organization has just been downsizing this year. Zoya is merely one of many others who are being let go. Cost-cutting and all that. It seems there’s this general feeling within academic publishing that much of what Zoya does, professionally, might be better performed by an artificial intelligence.

And so my friend, the former Fulbright scholar, who formerly worked at the Kennedy School of Government, and then afterwards in academic publishing, is presently shifting to her second job, which is stacking shelves for a retailer.

There is more I could add. In fact, there was much that I did add, and yet, after some consideration, I decided to hit the backspace key several hundred times. Editing, you know. It’s terribly important.

With chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel

PS: please enjoy the following picture that I found on the internet this week.