Let me not boil it down for you.
I rarely gave a thought to that job after leaving it, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. It’s hard to imagine work better suited to the talents of an AI chatbot. Feed in the text of an article, and out pops a serviceable summary at a specified length. What I and my colleagues labored to produce in a month, a bot could output in seconds. I’d like to think the abstracts we wrote were at least slightly better than what a machine would generate — we actually understood what we were reading, right? — but I’m probably kidding myself.
If I went back and read our summaries now, I suspect I would discover a high percentage of slop. And surely the bot’s work would have been more consistent in style and level of detail than what the bunch of us churned out in our isolated cubicles. I can’t help but feel retrospectively disposable.