The Nemesis of Content Creators
When I moved back to the United States from Greece, it was not my initial intention to become a self-employed freelance writer. I looked for a job. Any job. Well, almost any job. I drew the line at flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant, although some of my sons took such employment for a time when they first got here. However, I could not find a traditional job. My first attempt was to seek a position teaching English as a Second Language at one of the many private language schools in San Diego, the city where I initially landed. After all, I had taught English in Greece for over fifteen years; I was very good at it and had excellent references. I went around to every language school in the area and filled out applications, left reference letters, and so on. Several of the schools were impressed but would not give me an interview; one of them honestly explained to me that though they would like to hire me they couldn’t because I didn’t have a college degree. Damn. Whatever. At one point I applied for a position at a tech company. I impressed the hiring manager and went into the office for a video interview with a higher-up, who really liked me. Again, they wouldn’t hire me. In this case, it was blatant ageism. I was almost sixty years old, and no one else in their office was over thirty. When I went to apply for a job as a Fed-Ex delivery assistant for the Christmas holiday season, hundreds of people showed up to apply for a couple of dozen positions.
And so I turned to the internet to search for freelance writing work to stave off abject poverty. After all, at the time I was responsible for several of my sons who had accompanied me to the New World. Fairly quickly I found jobs. For instance, I got a few hundred dollars for an article on the local surfing scene for a start-up website. Soon after, I got a steady gig writing daily articles on topics of interest to seniors for a company selling Medicare Advantage plans. When that source dissipated, I found websites offering paid writing work that could be claimed on a one-by-one basis. It didn’t pay much, but it supplemented the income from occasional short story sales and royalties from my self-published books. One website would fold and another would open. For months I was writing travel articles: one or two a day for a major online travel company. For a time I was writing mainly business articles. Later I wrote articles on history, literature, and other topics for an educational website; this was one of my favorite gigs.
And then, sadly, came AI, which scrapes the Internet, acquires data, processes it, and regurgitates it in the form of generic articles similar, though far inferior, to those I had been writing. The websites I’d been writing for didn’t care about the diminished quality; using AI was so much cheaper that they gladly took the hit. What they were mainly after was increasing traffic to their websites via SEO through key words and phrases. Quantity, not quality, is what they wanted. One by one, these websites closed to human writers. If we suffered financially as a result, they didn’t give a damn; after all, we were freelancers and they were not legally responsible for us.
By this time, my sons had moved out and I was on my own, so at least my struggle for income did not affect them. I was too old to look for some shit job to pay the bills, so in desperation I searched for any type of paid online work I could find. (I had begun to collect Social Security but because I had spent decades overseas I could only claim a few hundred dollars a month.) Most of this online work involved short writing tasks and even filling out surveys. I figured anything was better than nothing.
And now we come to the reason for this essay. One of the most lucrative survey sites suddenly cut me off. The ostensible reason seems to be that I took my computer to another city for a few days and when I got back the algorithm will no longer recognize and approve my network connection. But here’s the thing: when I wrote a human support member to correct the error, I was told there was nothing they could do – that I had to wait until the algorithm self-corrected. In other words, the human was helpless; the algorithm was in charge. What the hell? What have we come to that in a matter such as this, humans will defer to algorithms to make final decisions about humans? Something is very, very wrong. People have become so lazy and indifferent that they are unloading tasks onto algorithms that algorithms are not or should not be designed for. Already even fiction markets are being inundated with bland, generic stories that obviously have been created by machines. They are attempting to cope with this flood of crap, but it slows down their editorial processes and makes it more difficult to work with real human artists. It’s an ongoing concern. I can’t say that I have answers, as I am still dealing with it myself, but somehow we have to set clear limits between what machines can and should do, and what should be left to humans as they communicate one to another.
As a postscript, I can report that someone at this particular website in question finally did take the trouble to investigate and correct the mistake. However, the larger problem in general of ceding online authority to algorithms still applies.
