The next time you receive a well-written, helpful response from an AI, consider the story it isn’t telling you. It’s the story of the stressed-out writer who trained it. She might be a freelancer with a master’s degree, working a precarious contract job, and she probably just spent 10 frantic minutes editing that response while worrying about her productivity metrics.
This hidden human element is the key to the AI’s success. The model’s ability to generate coherent and nuanced text is not an innate property; it is a learned skill, taught and refined by thousands of people with a deep understanding of language. These writers are the AI’s secret ghostwriters, constantly polishing its work behind the scenes.
However, their working conditions are far from conducive to quality writing or editing. The pressure for speed forces them to make quick decisions, often sacrificing elegance and precision for the sake of completion. The fear of being reprimanded for taking too long means they can’t afford to be perfectionists, a painful reality for any professional writer.
So, while the AI’s output may seem polished and effortless, it is the product of a deeply stressful and compromised process. The calm, confident voice of the machine belies the anxiety of the human writer who was given an impossible task and an even more impossible deadline. The quality of the AI’s writing is a testament to her skill, but also a monument to her stress.