I work in [redacted]. I type all day. I am a font of language and thought. The torrent of speech begins early in the day and does not cease until my eyes close.
I work in [redacted]. The central by-product, manifestation, and deliverables, more often than not, come to reside in PowerPoint presentations. The PowerPoint presentation acts not only as a strategic touchstone and locus of findings and recommendations, but also as a repository of information accumulated over many weeks. When I open PowerPoint and begin to type, betimes there appears a thin, doubled blue line beneath certain phrasings, fragments, or portions of the sentences. This is the “Grammar Check” feature. It highlights the ungrammatical, “unconcise” (its phrasing), awkward, or any other composition it deems undesirable. I accept that, in a world of unrelenting labor arbitrage and LLM-generated logorrhea where the difficult-to-learn, harder-to-master English is the required operating tongue of all speakers native and otherwise, this feature will increasingly come to dominate text-base language processing applications. It makes me want to kill myself.
I work in [redacted]. My deadlines are brisk yet— if English is one’s first language and one matriculated from a four-year institution with a Bachelor’s degree— fair. My direct reports have begun to return work to me that has been notably GPT-4’d. In addition to the first few openly-credited usages I have been able to spot other instances about which they weren’t as forthright. This text wears a thin furze of comprehensiveness yet is larded with filler phrases, prose padding, dithering. I suspect that content not a product of a human mind lacks the reinforcing tangle of uneven yet thickening circumlocution to hold it upright. Human synthesis may be spotty, yet it acts as backing; these passages yield and dissolve under even cursory scrutiny. My direct reports fidget and smile proudly when I ask them if they used GPT-4. They are pleased with the time they’ve saved themselves. I congratulate them on their gumption; I remind them of the data, confidentiality, and security policies they are subject to as employees of [redacted], and encourage them to aggressively pursue the official permissions they’d require to continue using these tools regularly for deliverables, as I am not in a position to grant these permissions. I ask them to return to the proverbial drawing board. They are disappointed. I notice that the office is fracturing along lines of which uses for GPT-4 are deemed “fair” and which “cheating.” No one seems to believe that “not using GPT-4” is an option.
I work in [redacted]. When I am not working (a state of increasing rarity) I am reading about the Venetian Academy and books detailing tools that turn the ars memoria into a machine for recollection and cognition. Many of these tools envision the human mind as series of wheels, intervolved and rotating against one another, sending off sparks of wisdom. I am involuntarily, disgustingly, reminded of the dozens of mental models, heuristics, cognitive tools, rules-of-thumb I rifle through and deploy every moment of my day to sort for accuracy, comprehensiveness, concision. I wonder at the complexity and involved nature of the mnemonics and devices. The vision of memory as a location that contains multitudinous places extends richly before me, tempting me with what one might do when the thought or idea one wants is not ready to hand immediately. Yet the speed required hangs about the mind’s ankles like kettlebells, and demands the toolkit be smaller— a compact knife of folded blades and inadequate corkscrews.
I work in [redacted]. Through the windows the sun gleams. There is a plangent feeling in the raw air. The world is new and the moon is new and the year has turned again to the top of the wheel, where the cardinal first sign leaps forward in fire. One must charm oneself first and constantly, or else one has no hope of winning over anyone else.