The Literary Underground

 As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set. 

Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them. 

On some level, this is just the next evolution of what has long been a fixture of life on Grub Street: the hack writing gig. Before AI, it was ghost writing self-help books (I did one of those; though of course, contractually, I can't tell you which!)

But there seems to be a special indignity involved in this one. Here, not only do you have to do insulting grunt work—you have to do it on behalf of a machine designed to replace your own job and render you redundant and otiose. 

The only way to make money writing, in the new AI economy, is to help make it even harder for other writers—and your future self!—to ever again make a living doing the same. So it can feel, at any rate (the future being unknowable). 

This makes the new AI training gigs something worse than just the classic hack job, familiar to anyone who's tried to make a living with their pen. People are being dragooned into an act of self- and guild-betrayal. 

I'm reminded of Robert Darnton's portrayal of the hack writers of the "literary underground" of pre-revolutionary France—the ones who came to Paris with hopes and dreams of joining the noble crusade against superstition and ignorance. 

Instead of succeeding as philosophes, the vast majority of these besotted idealists ending up having to accept degrading gig work from the very force they came to the capital to combat—namely, the government of the old regime. 

Specifically, many of the "poor devils" in the literary underground had to prostitute themselves out as "spies" to the government—informing on their friends and fellow philosophical radicals—or else selling glorified pornography. 

This element of self-betrayal—this wound to the integrity—went deeper than any other insult these poor writers had to suffer. The worst of it wasn't just the deprivation and the disappointment—it was having to sell one's honor to the enemy. 

"In making them its spies and smut-peddlers," Darnton writes—with his characteristic eloquence—the regime "had violated their moral core and desecrated their youthful visions of serving humanity honorably in Voltaire's church."

It's hard to escape the impression that something similar is happening with AI today. It's one thing to be displaced and render destitute by the technology. Far worse is to be made an instrument of one's own and one's colleagues' downfall in the process!

Screenwriters and anyone else trying to live by the pen have always had a hard lot, unless they happen to have other sources of income. "In this trade we pay no wages," as the god Apollo tells an aspiring bard, in one of Basil Bunting's poems. 

But to force the would-be writer to participate in their own trade's displacement, as the price of survival, is particularly cruel. 

It wounds the young writer where it hurts—the "moral core"—the idealistic notion of the creative professions that made them write in the first place.