Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

It isn’t flattering to understand that what I do is quite predictable.

Ah these AI chattering bots—they are amazing. Type a question, they call it a prompt, in plain English and out pops answers, sometimes as long as books, in plain English. This is amazing!

Well, the software looks at a bunch of numbers and such that has been gathered. It predicts the next word that is most likely. An example prompt is, “There is a town in Texas that has the same name as a big city in France. That town name is what?”

The answer is Paris. That’s just the most likely word given all the numbers calculated by reading all the stuff on the Internet. Predictable. Simple.

Wait a minute…writing is predictable. Answering questions is predictable. So much of this amazing stuff is predictable. What I do all day is … predictable. Yikes! If I am so predictable, then software can predict and do my job.

Hmm. Perhaps I should be doing something that is not so predictable. Perhaps I should be producing something that is not so predictable. Perhaps…