When slop doesn’t sell, it pays to have a human touch.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
If the past five years of living with generative AI in the marketplace have taught us anything, it’s that management is depraved. Fewer employers, it seems, feel they owe their workers. The idea of reciprocity has vanished. Labor has been utterly devalued. Instead, our culture worships a parasitic class of billionaires who have nothing to offer but intellectual theft, political corruption, and insipid mediocrity; all delivered via infrastructure built by the taxpaying plebes whose futures they despise and destroy. As the 99% struggle month to month, there is not a single corner left uncut. Every manager in the country is shooting off the same squirt gun at the roaring wildfire that is coming to kill us all: Hey, what if we tried AI and let some people go?
Some background: This column does not pay my mortgage, nor does my creative practice. So, like almost everyone else in a creative field, I take plenty of non-creative work. While many writers have academic tendencies, because my own weird career has existed more in art than book publishing, my paying work has tended more toward PR and luxury branding. I enjoy it, and I am also lucky to often work for or with my friends. But starting roughly two years ago, around once a week, I began receiving emails about “changing editorial protocol to incorporate AI” that triggered a reaction in me comparable to Clark Griswold’s psychotic break when gifted a Jelly of the Month Club membership. (“It’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year!”) More disconcerting than losing gig after gig to AI was the deeper conviction that the institutional rot and delusional technofascism that has dogged my adult life would definitely not course-correct in time for me to execute a successful career pivot in my 40s. I did not and do not have that kind of faith in our near future.
To put it mildly, this came at a bad time. Budgeting is increasingly untenable everywhere, especially in NYC, where I live. According to the comptroller, over half of New Yorkers spend over 30% or more of their income on rent. Even the rightwing NY Post has reported that the cost of groceries has increased 20-33% since 2020. Meanwhile, billionaire wealth grew 25% percent globally last year alone; yet in the US, typical hourly compensation has risen by only 29% since 1979, even as American worker productivity has grown 80%-150% (depending on how it’s measured). Wage stagnation feels like a polite euphemism for getting royally fucked.
I wish I were writing from the trenches of late-stage capitalism; hell, I wish I were writing from the frontlines. But I’m not: As a freelance writer, I’m writing from the pine box. Or, more precisely, certain possibilities of my career are now buried in the pine box, as I am still very much alive and bitchy enough to point out that autocorrect tried to remove the subjunctive mood from the first sentence of this paragraph. Granted, this observation in and of itself probably won’t convince the average technocrat that we still need writers. (Jessica Lange voice: “There’s not going to be a subjunctive on Mars, you stupid slut!”) But nothing really needs to make sense when HAL 9000 is at the wheel; in our AI hellscape, grammar, syntax, and even good old cohesion are as quaint as trench warfare and, accordingly, have been left to die in No Man’s Land.
Despite the ubiquity of AI in public discourse, however, the freelance marketplace has recently changed its tune: Almost all the work I lost 18 to 24 months ago has started coming back.
I graduated from high school in 2000, so I have lived through three economic crashes during my adult working life. That’s also three times the lived experience necessary to know that—except for the friends who created opportunities for me as the market fell apart—no one has been hiring me back out of the goodness of their hearts. Instead, most of my freelance writing work has returned for one simple reason: Slop doesn’t sell.
AI slop is smooth to the point of blather—a word gruel so meaningless and anodyne as to be better left ignored. The attention economy is depleting us all; consumers are saving their eyes the strain. For every manager who said, Screw it, just put some words on a page, let AI do it, customers have slipped away. People can intuitively recognize slop even as it wears the human brain down. Their eyes don’t stick. They know something is off, even if they don’t have words for it. Journalistic organizations have produced playbooks of AI copy tells, while a handful of social media accounts break down how to spot AI in images. (Though the latter is admittedly getting trickier and trickier.) At the same time, Google is getting hilariously, terrifyingly stupid, as a direct result of a reliance on AI-driven searches. Even Forbes is reporting on how slop is hurting bottom lines.
These days, when I’m hired for freelance work, I am given the same brief: Leave some fingerprints. I am now paid not so much as a human who writes, but as a writer who can leave a human trace—usually after AI was used somewhere in the process before a project was handed off to me.
What, exactly, is a fingerprint? It’s a series of grooves that gain purchase, and leaves little slicks of oil and grease, the messy residue of humanity. For a writer, that means stylistic fingerprints. While there is a romance to handprints—from the Lascaux Caves to the Hollywood Walk of Fame—fingerprints evoke culpability. Long the gold standard in forensic criminology, there is disturbingly little standardization in how to match them, and fingerprints have led to a number of wrongful convictions. Somehow, this feels apt: Even as I am hired back, it serves as a chilling little reminder that the writer will be the first to blame if things don’t work out. Our prints will be all over the failure—whether or not it was really our fault.
We all have bills to pay, and AI has certainly gotten in the way of me paying mine. Simultaneously, like it or not, today, most working writers have a hybridized relationship with AI. To me, this means that it is incumbent upon the writer to define what AI can and cannot do. Primarily, AI is iterative. It proffers answers without construing a thing, barfing out facts devoid of comprehension. Limited by its lack of consciousness, AI has no depth, no shine: It might construct, but it cannot constellate. It’s not quite a misnomer to call AI “intelligence” if one reduces intelligence to mere problem-solving. However, the reduction in the meanings of the words “artificial” and “intelligence” is paired with a certain omnipotence and unknowability—much like the meanings of the words “plastic” and “cancer.” If AI can perform a “creative” task, that task was probably not creative at all. AI cannot touch the kind of ineffable expression that matters to me, those traces of human creativity that are, as one writer once put it, commensurate with our capacity for wonder. Call me Jungian (not that anyone ever would on a Zoom call), but I believe consciousness is required for creative output. The bigger question is why do we want to replace human creativity at all?
On a practical level, by all means, let AI take dictation and turn the transcript into notes with an outline—that, of course, will need a human who was paying attention to check. Let it kick off a round of brainstorming, if you must. I wouldn’t begrudge a bot a PowerPoint deck any more than I’d begrudge my washing machine dirty clothes. AI should make our lives simpler. It should do dishes or sort toxic chemicals or help researchers image cancer cells—not take musicians’ work. But, what’s at stake when we offload the latter is more than just losing work that pays, especially in creative fields we historically undervalue, yet need in order to make life tolerable. Just as we cannot trust the free market to take care of the vulnerable, we cannot entrust the arts or our cultural legacy to it, either.
So why are we developing a technology that could destroy life as we know it within a decade, according to whistleblowers with scripts straight out of B horror movies? The answer is that we are not; the ketamine-snorting tech buffoons we have let run amok are. It’s their bottom line, but it’s our culture, communities, and environment. Technology ought to serve all levels of society, not merely our tech overlords who see everyone else as nothing but consumers to be chewed up and spat out—or occasionally as useful producers who can leave fingerprints that encourage said consumers to consume. We need to stop feeding the beast. Instead, we need class consciousness. We need a Works Progress Administration. And we need to identify, to protect, and to fund the creative class.
When I lost almost all my work, I focused on projects and people who made my life feel more expansive, even as my prospects for income dwindled. I took work that paid for travel and creative projects that garnered more bylines. Without fronting on my part, no one looking at my CV would have had any idea how much my confidence or my bank account were hurting. Arthur Jafa, who has a stunning retrospective at the New Museum, said the following during a recent talk when asked about his perception of his success: “There’s not a map, I can’t give you a map. And if I could, this is not the road you want to travel. This fucking shit is like hair-raising, you know what I mean? Like my hair is fucking gray.”
While I was enjoying what I consider the biggest professional and personal successes of my life thus far, I simply had no idea where the money would be coming from, and reasoned that was a preferable problem to have than being unhappy or creatively unfulfilled. I just panicked a lot, like a real adult. I had no idea when the money would appear, like a real artist. Now that the work has returned, I’m also still digging myself out from a giant deficit (interest is real, even if the emails one sends to chase invoices, apparently, are not); and freelancers are always paid last (one can essentially borrow against us and we are powerless to charge interest, though a Freelancers’ Payment Fund has been proposed in NYC).
I wouldn’t tell anyone to do as I say or as I do. That said, if generative AI has allowed me to realize anything, it’s the centrality of my own fingerprint. And I don’t mean that in terms of capital. I remain cynical as ever about that exchange, but also determined to continue to fund my silly little life. Rather, I mean it in the sense that Heraclitus expressed when he wrote that character is fate. Many, maybe most, don’t get to explore and exercise their potential. But, if you are so lucky, your own unique ability to world-build both by yourself and with those around you is what matters—and you don’t need a creative career to do so. No bot can take that away. No bot can do that at all.
If AI is a cheap trick of a Turing Test that just happens to be destroying the planet, I’ll take consciousness, chaos, and mess. I’ll take shouting into the wind until it knocks me down to the ground for good. That’s what artists of all stripes have been doing since time immemorial, and lucky are we to count their fingerprints among us, to keep us going through it all.
