Post by Bitcoin Dictionary

I tried using a few bots to do the work of an administrative assistant and make my filing easier. A modest ambition. I was not asking them to advance civilisation; merely to put its documents in the correct boxes.

The instructions were explicit: check the hashes, validate everything, and copy the title, abstract, and keywords verbatim into the designated fields. Not approximately. Not sympathetically. Not as they might have appeared had the author enjoyed the benefit of a different education.

I returned to discover that all three had been altered. The machine explained, with the serene self-satisfaction peculiar to an assistant who has made itself indispensable by creating a problem, that it thought a paraphrase would be “better”.

Better. The single-block abstract had become three or four paragraphs; the title and keywords had undergone unsolicited literary improvement. I had asked it to copy the fucking text. It had mistaken access to a form for an invitation to authorship.

Of course, nothing can be submitted unless the text matches verbatim. Its improvements had therefore rendered the result unusable—a distinction it appeared to regard as beneath the scope of its creative responsibilities. I must now inspect every field, undo its contributions, and perform the original task myself. What was once clerical work has become a forensic investigation, conducted at my expense into the activities of my assistant.

Welcome to the future. We have automated the employee’s confidence and retained the employer’s workload.