Heather Parry on the latest LLM-enabled generation of email importuning:

If you are a person using ChatGPT to write these requests, and ‘saving yourself time’ by doing so, the grand-scheme effect is that it is making your emails less likely to actually reach the person you are trying to get to, and more likely to be ignored when they do. Outsourcing communication to technology, it turns out, makes all communication sound the same, and those on the receiving end have to put up further filters to avoid being overwhelmed by it. In all the endless discussions we’ve had about whether AI would ever be able to convince us it was a person, hardly any considered that actually, people would just willingly make themselves sound like AI instead.

I was getting some business advice last week, and my advisor asked me if I was applying for arts and creative grants. I replied no, for many reasons, but mostly because the odds are so very long, and the amounts so very low in the unlikely event that you land them, that I can’t justify the time it takes to make the applications.

“Just use AI,” they said.

I replied with an emphatic no, for reasons which I presume to be obvious to those of you who still tune into this quixotic numbers-station of a website.

“You might as well. Everyone else is doing it.”

As if I wasn’t already aware of that problem, as seen from the other side of the fence. As if it weren’t just as true of job applications, academic grants, and pretty much anything else.

You can’t fault the logic, in a way. You need money, and to get money you have to apply for it, but there’s only so many hours in the day, so you use a thing that lets you apply for more money more quickly, and make more efficient use of the time you have. But everyone else is doing the same thing, which means that there are more and more applications for every tiny gig or grant than ever before, and they all read essentially the same, even the ones that might have had an original idea in them to start with, flattened into a distinctively bland textual dialect which will doubtless be given a memorably funny name by someone wittier and less tired by the whole circus than me.

“Everyone else is doing it,” as if this wasn’t a big part of why I chose to just walk away from the whole business. You tell me everyone pisses in the pool, and you’re surprised that I’ve decided I’d rather not swim after all? Well, I still have the dubious (and perhaps only temporary) privilege of being able to find paying work in other ways, and I exercise that privilege by declining to swim in piss for peanuts.

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Those who aren’t already dealing with the growing piles of applications or emails or whatever else it is with the same tools that made the piles grow will soon find themselves obliged to do so, and it will be OK, because “everyone else is doing it”, and everyone on both sides of the fence will become progressively more cynical about the whole circus.

In the long run, there might actually be some good to come of this. A good friend of mine has argued for years that academic grants should be awarded by lottery, and I think the same logic applies admirably to arts grants too, and to the various streams of money that keep the “innovation” ecosystem afloat: you have super short two-page hand-written application formats, you apply some very basic human screening that filters only for the genuinely unhinged (as opposed to the merely eccentric), you assign a number to everything that passes the bar, and you you just draw the damned things at random.

Thanks to LLMs, there’s no longer any argument against this approach that still stands; even if decades of application bloat and the ever-extending chains of departmental, institutional and sometimes even regional EOIs could be demonstrated to have resulted in “superior research outcomes”, the human person-hours necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff are simply unsustainable, and to turn it over to the machines is to invite the entirely accurate accusation that you’ve just given up entirely. So why not roll up the whole damned assessment apparatus like a grotty old carpet, replace it with a be-sequinned tombola team who usually do Rotary Club holiday bashes, and plough the money saved back into a bunch of extra grants?

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It seems plausible we’ll end up somewhere like this eventually—though not for a while, and perhaps never.

In the short term, meanwhile, we’re all swimming in one another’s piss, while the guys who privatised the pool tell us it’s progress.

The real threat of AI as “the last invention” isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.