Or: In the words of King Crimson, “Three of a Perfect Pair”
It’s nothing new, just that it’s finally getting attention as researchers and those people who are curious about how things work and get used, we’re starting to see behind the façade of AI. This morning’s email (so far!) has yielded three notes from Linked In (ugh) with supposed job postings.
I only went back to using LI when I arrived here in QBC, as I was trying to find a local English school for whom I might be able to teach. Obviously, I’m using search terms relating to my editing, translation/localization, and language-teaching skills as the main terms for searching. It has reached the point that when I see a post from particular “agencies” I delete the email immediately.
Why?
Because even though a post is alleged to be for teaching English, it is invariably about “training” someone’s AI. Worse still, the interviews have been with AI agents. And worse still, it appears that the whole thing has been generated by AI: the post and email, the job description, the interview… all of it.
Three screen caps to show the range of what I’m being sent:
Note that this last one — with the ads all from an organization called “English 1” is reruting almost entirely for teachers to go to China, so maybe it’s not fair to paint them with the AI brush.
The thing is, 404 Media just ran a story about how “AI” means “African Intelligence” due to the manner in which AI firms have been victimizing workers in Africa. What follows in the link below explains further —
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/
… this aligns completely with my amusing myself last summer, tricking chatbots into revealing not just that they were AI chatbots, but even to the level of which versions they were running.
That Grateful Dead quote keeps coming back: “…it’s even worse than it appears.”
