One of the jokes of the modern world is how upper management still believes itself superior to “the plebs”, in a country long pretending to be egalitarian.
In America, those who actually do the work are judged inferior by their bosses, merely because bosses* earn 28,000% percent more.
Does upper management actually believe its’ own press clippings?
Of course, the upper management ego has had an effect on the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Publishing managers (who oversee AI) now seem to believe that articles can be published if they just “read right.”
Who needs editing, or fact checking?
During my years as a book and magazine production artist, there were steps to be followed.
The writers would write articles.
After that, the editors would edit the stories to make sure that they made sense, and were well organized.
Then, fact checkers would verify all the facts.
If errors were found, editors would rewrite sections of each story, making sure all the facts were verified.
After the editors were finished, a proofreader (with “fresh eyes”) would read the stories to make sure that there were no spelling errors, grammar, or punctuation errors, that the head editor hadn’t discovered.
In books or articles on medicine and science—where accuracy is crucial—additional reviewers would frequently be hired to review the same stories.
(Despite all this work, we would still find mistakes at the page design stage, because of human error—the wrong article being transmitted, or a correction accidentally not made.)
Of course, from the “Olympian world” of upper management, this process just looked like a bunch of people doing the same darn thing.
What waste!
Get rid of them!
Reduce the staff by half!
As a result of upper management not understanding what’s involved in producing accurate information, nowadays “content producers” seem to be framing sentences so AI can write stories for them.
Then, the content producers are ignorant enough to be placing these un-edited, un-proofread stories on the web!
No wonder “AI slop” and “junk data” abound!
I’m not saying that AI can’t improve articles, or save people hours of work.
It’s that content providers are using AI improperly.
Why not have AI look for spelling errors, grammar, or punctuation errors, and then have a human being verify?
Why not wait until the story is done, and then have AI look at it in a final step?
AI might well find errors that human beings haven’t seen.
However, in a world where AI actually makes up material, no human being should trust AI to be correct ALL the time.
What AI certainly shouldn’t be doing is writing the story from the beginning.
Don’t the bosses realize that AI can’t tell the difference between truth and fiction?
Recently, it’s come to light that thousands of scammers having been duping local and Federal government officials for years.
It’s estimated that $3.5 billion was lost to hospice fraud, in Los Angeles County alone!
Every year, Medicare is losing over $60 billion to fraud and abuse.
Discovering fraud and abuse is one area where humans could use AI to ferret out false invoices (if humans, with AI help, just designed a good program).
Why not design a program that can find instances of workers working more than eight hours in a single day?
Why not design a program that can spot a hospice facility that has no patients?
Why not design a program that knows that a bed pan shouldn’t cost $300?
After AI has created such a program, hire a REAL staff of people to review all those flagged invoices, and NOT approve them willy nilly.
That would be a proper use of AI.
Instead, those in charge are using AI to write unclear descriptions of web sites, write forms for patients to fill out in waiting rooms, text to people waiting for lost packages, and suggest hints to users of Ancestry.com.
These uses all badly need an editor to review them, and make sure that they make sense.
However, because these creations “look right” to a badly trained “boss person,” humans are left to cope with unclear descriptions, bad forms, frustrating responses about our packages, and ridiculous hints.
Rather than use AI effectively to fight fraud and abuse, non-creatives are using AI to create illustrations and articles, an activity that AI is simply not skilled at!
It’s always annoyed me how upper management seemed to be so jealous of their staff doing the “fun jobs” like designing and illustrating.
Occasionally, higher-ups would made inappropriate suggestions as to fonts, type sizes, and images.
It was particularly galling when these managers refused to accept that their suggestions couldn’t be implemented.
I remember one Design Director telling me that she NEVER let on which of her designs she preferred, when showing a set of rough designs to a group of higher-ups.
It seemed that when she did tell the group which design was her favorite, the head honcho would deliberately not pick it.
Was this act an exercise in control and dominance?
Was the head honcho envious of the designer?
These days, AI is giving CEOs and upper management their ideal middle management and staff employee.
AI will do anything they ask it do, no matter how wrong.
AI will act as their hands, and never complain.
*CEO salaries average $18.9 million to $22.98 million. Thus, CEOs earn roughly 28,000% more than the average employee. At the lowest-paying large companies, the gap is wider, with CEOs earning 632 times more than their median employees.
