Issue #26. It all depends on how you use it

Thank you for all your kind notes about my family last week. ❤️

On today’s quest:

— People are bad. AI makes it easier
— The apprentice gap
— AI cat and mouse

AI: Good or bad? (Yes)

People on my social media feeds are extremely angry about the CEO of Penguin Random House saying he hopes AI will help them publish more books without hiring more employees, which doesn’t surprise me because people on my social media feeds seem to be extremely angry about everything related to AI.*

But as always, I think it depends on how companies use AI.

I suspect we can all agree it would be great if publishers could publish more books.

If they do it the right way, it’s good for authors. I would love for people on my Quick and Dirty Tips team to use AI so they can spend less time generating reports and more time helping me make more podcast episodes or courses.**

If they do it the wrong way, it’s bad for authors. I can imagine publishers using too much AI for editing in a way that leads to lower quality books and less development attention for authors. I appreciate the thoughtful editorial comments I’ve gotten on my books.

And then we have the gray areas. For example, I find myself wondering if it would be good or bad for publishers to run every manuscript in the slush pile through an AI to identify the ones it might want to publish. The wait time to hear back on fiction submissions sounds like torture to me. And it’s such a subjective process I wonder if AI would be better at it than at least some of the people who do it and would pick out the gems that currently get overlooked.*** Or, maybe AI would be biased and an egregious upholder of the status quo. I have no idea.

AI: Increasing the speed of badness

I saw two big AI stories last week that in my mind weren’t actually about AI:

• The George Carlin “AI” comedy special

• The Taylor Swift AI-generated photos on X/Twitter

George Carlin. A couple of YouTube comics who pretend to have a show run by AI pretended to use AI to create a new comedy special featuring an AI-resurrected George Carlin. But when they rightly got sued by George Carlin’s estate, it came out that they had written the jokes themselves (which should be embarrassing because people said the jokes weren’t that funny and at least before they could blame AI). They are still rightly being sued.

Taylor Swift. Some jerk used AI to create fake explicit images of Taylor Swift and posted them on X/Twitter. This is at least partly an AI story, but only because AI makes creating these images so easy. Still, criminals have been posting similar images online for decades — both real but taken with an expectation of privacy and faked with Photoshop. AI just makes it easier.

So again, the story isn’t that AI is evil. It’s just that people are evil, and AI makes evil easier (sometimes).

The Apprentice Gap

A fear I’m seeing widely discussed is the apprentice gap: the workforce hole that will be left when AI replaces so many low-level jobs that companies won’t have enough skilled workers to promote in the future.

For example, in MuckRack’s recent survey of PR professionals, the top fear, cited by 67% of respondents, was that “younger/newer PR pros don’t learn the principles of the profession and rely too heavily on tools.”

A recent IMF report also mentions the problem (in perhaps the most academic terms possible), but also sees upsides: “On one hand, if low-complementarity positions, such as clerical jobs, serve as stepping stones toward high-complementarity jobs, a reduction in the demand for low-complementarity occupations could make young high-skilled workers’ entry into the labor market more difficult. On the other hand, AI may enable young college-educated workers to become experienced more quickly as they leverage their familiarity with new technologies to enhance their productivity.”

News

AI cover letters

A woman who is having trouble getting a job made a ranty post on Threads about why she refuses to write cover letters. After I got over my shock that there were more “hell yeah!” responses than “maybe you should try writing cover letters” responses, I noticed that a lot of people also said something like “Why aren’t you just having AI write your cover letters? That’s what I do.”

AI turtles all the way down

We know that schools are paying for (seriously flawed) AI detectors through services such as TurnItIn. Well now, it appears students are paying for AI to rewrite their work to keep it from being flagged by said AI detectors. Because of course they are. It’s a whole genre of tools, and anecdotally, I’m told that some students are so afraid of getting flagged, they are having AI rewrite things they actually wrote themselves. It’s just one story, so don’t quote me on it, but it seemed worth mentioning.

What is AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

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^{*  I’m not saying it’s without good reason. People are feeling extremely threatened. But it surprised me that “we’d like to publish more books” made people angry. And yes, I get that it was the “without more people” part that was the problem. But I presume they’re publishing as many books as they can, and that if it wasn’t risky or bad business to bring on more employees to publish more books, they would. On the other hand, I often give businesses more credit for making smart, informed decisions than they deserve.}

^{** I feel like maybe I need a disclaimer: I don’t work for a publisher, but my Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network operates in partnership with Macmillan, and that partnership has published a few books (although I’m not involved in any of the decisions or operations on that side of the business, so don’t pitch me). I’m also a published author with Macmillan imprints. I don’t consider myself to be a publisher, but I think it’s fair to say I’m “publisher adjacent.”}

^{*** I’m sure you’ve heard the same stories I have about bestsellers that were rejected 30 times before someone decided to publish them.}

^{Written by a human.}