This is how you lose the AI war
Employer invited proposals for developing new learning modules. Adjacent to our regular work, a small but worth-the-trouble cash award if selected. Some of the target areas I’m already interested in. Awesome, let’s click through to the submission rules.
- You explicitly approve of your proposals being fed into an AI system.
- They use AI for a first-pass evaluation, and to generate suggestions for improvement.
- We are assured that a human makes the final decision.
- No data or estimate on how many proposals are being solicited, accepted or selected.
So, motivated by the carrot of some cash and the spirit of innovation and competition, we have a 100% chance of training an AI for free, and an unspecified but far lower chance of some cash at the other end--if the AI likes our submission and a human agrees. Then we get to actually do the work to develop the module.
I’m not unaware of the AI tsunami, and I guess it’s a privilege now to even be told that our proposals will be fed to it. What can one person do? This is how the world is now. And the primary consideration shouldn’t be the AI or the money, but who the learning modules eventually help, right?
I have two proposals in mind. One really good. And fuck if they’ll ever see them.