Mouthwords

BRIAN MERCHANT writes about the abrupt Sora shutdown and notes one important component of that whole fiasco: the most common response to slop is revulsion. I think we need to acknowledge that this is also the case for most workslop: the documents, pull requests, emails, Slack messages, and so on that have been made with so-called AI and heedlessly tossed at colleagues without review are generating sentiments that range from, at best, exhaustion and boredom, to, at worst, disgust and intense despair.

You have to wonder why workslop like this even exists. Documents and whatnot are all mechanisms for communicating between humans—a communication that is always lossy, because creating a shared understanding between people is, and always will be, one of the hardest things we’ll ever do. Workslop dramatically increases that lossiness, with what we mean to say drifting further and further away from us, mediated through machines that smooth out the tone and blur the intent until we are saying nothing at all. This is perhaps the point: the less we are able to communicate with each other, the less power we have to negotiate the conditions of our work.

We need to see the advent of workslop in the context of the technological aims of the last several decades, one of which has been to obfuscate the human labor involved in everything from driving to cooking to gathering (which I will note is one of our oldest human activities). Tap a few buttons and a meal appears at your door, or a car arrives to whisk you away, or a bag of supplies manifests itself. All the people who worked to make that happen—the cooks, the farmers, the designers, the engineers, the factory workers, the ship’s crews, the longshoremen, the mods, the pilots, the janitors, the bankers, the diplomats and council members the world over, and so on—are hidden away, made invisible. It’s not that that labor doesn’t matter any more—there are good reasons that a port strike is taken very seriously—it’s that we are invited, even required, to avert our eyes.

Likewise, we don’t see the trillions of lines of code that fed the slop machines so that it could pump out a bloated, confusing, and ultimately brittle new feature for us. We don’t see the uncountable number of thoughtfully-written documents behind the one our colleague just sent us, the one that proposes a change in policy that is almost certainly illegal. And we definitely do not see the beleaguered worker tasked with reviewing and responding to this slop, who slouches ever deeper in her chair with each new message, until she wonders whether or not she will ever be able to get up. The tools and experiences imposed upon other workers have, as they inevitably would, come home to roost.

Two decades ago, David Graeber warned that having a bullshit job—a job with no obvious utility or purpose—was one of the most debilitating experiences any worker could have. Workslop is bullshit work at scale. This will get framed as a morale problem, which is true enough. But I promise you the technocrats pushing the slop machines do not give the slightest of fucks about your morale. This isn’t their problem; it’s yours.

So—what to do about it? I’ve seen a number of patterns emerging so far: teams discussing and defining new norms for how to pass around AI-generated documents, mostly coming down to the requirement to review and edit what you share before sharing it. Likewise: rules about the size of pull requests, or the number of PRs you can open at once, or good faith requests to limit the number of new wiki posts each week. But for these norms to stick they have to have some teeth. And that means you have to at some point refuse.

You have to refuse to review the 10,000 line PR which was submitted with a six-hour deadline. You have to refuse the sloppily bot-generated contributions to your open source project. You have to refuse to edit the slide deck that gets half a dozen things wrong about the business model, and the blog post that is so generically written you lose the will to live in the first paragraph. You have to refuse to read the proposal from the person who also hasn’t read it. You have to refuse to respond to the automated Slack message that seems entirely devoid of meaning whatsoever.

And you have to talk to the people around you—and when I say talk here, I mean with your mouths, the way humans have spoken to each other for millennia—about what the fuck is going on. Because like it or not, that’s the only way through this mess. Only by talking to each other can we counter the massive gaslighting and propaganda about how all this is inevitable (it isn’t) or about how you have no power whatsoever to change it (you do). Only by talking to each other can we enter that genuinely creative and generative space—not in the machine sense of sloppily recapitulating what’s come before, but in the profoundly human sense of sparking something new into existence—a space that only ever occurs in the encounters between people, in relationship to other humans and the more-than-human world. Only by talking to other people can we recall that we are humans, with human needs, one of which is not to be programmed like machines.

There is, as I am wont to point out, risk here. There is always risk! So long as you are a body, you are at risk of harm. There is risk in everything that you do and do not do. Your choice isn’t between risk and safety but different kinds of risk: choose well.