Never saw that one coming!
Oh wait, I did as I've been fixing unassisted human errors for a long time.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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If such rewrites netted a similar fee to traditional content writing jobs, it would be one thing — but as Richardson noted, companies pay less for cleaning up AI copy because they presume it's easier and less time-consuming, when it fact it often requires as much mental labor as content she had written herself.
Yeah so, they used the earth-burning slop generators, fired people over it, and now rehire cheaper to fix their hot mess (which sounds like one of the most futile and infuriating task one could do). Does not sound like as much of a win as the title would lead you to believe.
Speaking as a dev, I cannot wait for my job to be fixing inane machine slop code with half the pay, sounds like a real treat.
Idk if Doctorow actually coined it but its already part of my vocabulary. People that clean up AI code are reverse-centaurs by this terminology. People that are not using tools but are subservient to them, forced to deal with the AIs failings.
https://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-term-of-day-is-reverse-centaur.html?m=1
Or as Marx put it, humans are reduced to "conscious linkages" in the machine.
Eg an automation that can act on and through us, while we lack the ability to act upon it (speaking of the dominant tech + finance system workers are forced to slot themselves into). I'm paraphrasing Bifo poorly here.
That's exactly what they did with the Hollywood writers and one reason why they went on strike, so it was a given corpos would try that in every other industry.
Give it time. Right now they don't want the balance sheet to show how expensive this experiment was, but cheap devs will only get them so far. Eventually they'll need to pay someone properly to fix what the AI and the monkeys broke.
Yeah, I was pretty shocked that they were hiring devs to fix shit so soon, but I'm betting they're using outsourced devs for it, which like you said usually requires real devs to fix.
That's a very fair point. I would counter-argue that given the direction that software (and design, and writing...) has taken, even before the machine generated slop, it is unclear to me whether or not there is/will be a real incentive to properly fix things. But I know I am naturally quite pessimistic, so I hope you are right.
How about double pay as a consultant fixing the code from ai that was fixed by junior coders when it should have been senior.
Paying 3 times is good value, right?
But Elon is never wrong!
Pay is the biggest cost for almost every company and they are constantly looking for how to remove more employees. I'm in middle management in my huge organisation and upper management has just sent an email yesterday to say they've identified over 80 jobs that will be replaced by AI in coming weeks......big yikes.
Called it!