Reverse Centaurs
Cory Doctorow wrote a column for Locus about the exact difference between exciting AI stories and AI horror stories:
I was writing an article and I wanted to cite something I’d heard an expert say on a podcast. I couldn’t remember which expert, nor even which podcast. So I downloaded Whisper, threw 30 or 40 hours’ worth of podcasts I’d recently listened to at it, and then, a couple hours later, searched the text until I found the episode, along with timecode for the relevant passage. I was able to call up the audio and review it and match it to the transcript, correct a few small errors, and paste it into my essay….
Hearst’s King Features, who published the [AI-generated] “Summer Reading Guide,” replaced 30 interns, 10 newsroom journalists, and an entire fact-checking department with one freelancer….
There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I absolutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace. That would be [Hearst freelancer Marco] Buscaglia: who was given an assignment to do the work of 50 or more people, on a short timescale, and a shoestring budget.
I think this is exactly right. AI working for us is great. Us working for AI is a horror story.
[Via Doctorow’s own mind-expanding Plura-list newsletter.]